This is a combination of 2 problems: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/EJBTHREE-746 http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/EJBTHREE-863 The former is the reason the background thread that does EJB *passivations* ends up causing your bean to go through activation processing. The latter is why this fails -- the passivation thread does not have the correct context class loader. These both will be fixed in EJB3 RC10. Thanks very much for the report. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4010655#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...