I was mistaken - what happens is that I recieved a warning notice "service did not start within 120sec" at the same time as the microcontainer died. I don't know where this message comes from - it is a gui popup, so probably something in JBoss IDE. I figured out that microcontainer must have run out of memory. It just happened to occur at the exact same time as the timeout message appeared. No decent error message though (started from within JBoss IDE) - it just says "deployment failed" or something like that - no details. After having increased the memory size I was able to debug. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4059767#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...