thanks monkedan for your help. yeah after my several posts i myade this more and more confusing. initially i wanted to load a custom bundle like MyBundle located in /WEB-INF/classes. Then i tried to load the default messages bundle but that caused the NullPointerException What i think that i understood so far: In faces-config i defined a <message-bundle>messages</message-bundle> but i always got the NullPointerException. Now i modified the build.xml and copied the messages_XY.properties in the .jar package. now the bundle is found and a message is returned. I was expecting that it uses the files from /WEB-INF/classes directory but that seems to be wrong. But if i understood right, i can overwrite the built-in errormessages by adapting the messages.properties file in /WEb-INF/classes. What means that the standard converters retrieve the messages from this file. I inspected the source code of the MessageFactory.class from the jsf-api and it looks similar to mine. so that keeps me a little bit confused... but maybe im sitting in front of the screen for too long today... regards, hasc View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4037657#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...