I found this in the XDoclet reference: http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/xdoclet/tags/jboss-tags.html If you look for transaction-timeout, it seems to indicate that the change only applies if the method starts the transaction. Since that's never the case with MDB using REQUIRED, perhaps if you change it to REQUIRES_NEW you might get what you want. I've got the same issue, and I'm going to try this change soon. I'll post my results once I get a chance to try it out, but I thought I'd pass this guess along first, since you seemed desperate :-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3959203#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...