I also tried the binary distro first and got that same issue with fail to start Naming services (NullPointerException). I saw veraz's comments that a workaround by re-installing from source and kindda not sure what is the workaround. If you have any clue on how should I trouble-shoot this, please share. My application worked fine w/ jboss4.0.5 but when I upgrade to 4.2.2, the app server fails to start very early due to failures on starting naming services (NullPointerException, exactly the same exceptions Veraz posted above). I got stuck for some time on this exception and have no clue how to trouble-shoot. Thanks for any help, klein View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4108680#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...