For anyone interested, I got it working. If you're using the portal 2.2 example, don't - the packaging is misleading. I found it worked if I packaged the listener in a sar in an ear on it's own - this gets rid of so many problems. You don't need to include the portal lib jars - which can cause conflicts. Packaging it an ear gets rid of the startup problems. Then, as per the documentation, you add the listener to the *-object.xml and just package your portlet normally, which happens to get rid of hot redeploy errors if you were packaging the whole lot in an ear in the first place. I think having the listener as an inner class causes so many problems. But maybe I'm missing a piece of the bigger picture. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4023884#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...