Yes, I tried to combine JSF 1.2 with IceFaces and Facelets and came to the conclusion that this requires a lot of patching of IceFaces (despite Ted Goddard's claims elsewhere on this forum). I encountered and investigated your problem: Section 10.4.5 of the JSF 1.2 specification states that you must "provide a constructor that takes a single argument of the appropriate type (in casu ViewHandler), if you want that the custom implementation receives a reference to the implementation that was previously fulfilling the role." The D2DViewHandler uses the "original" (id est the Default ViewHandler) ViewHandler in the calculateRenderKitId method, unfortunately, the D2DSeamFaceletViewHandler doesn't provide the aforementioned constructor, so the original view handler is never passed in this custom view handler, causing the NullPointerException (as we all know, constructors aren't inherited). The patch is trivial, however, when you patch this, you will run into other issues. See for example my post in "Seam doesn't play with ICEFaces". Apparently the ICEFaces people don't seem to have a public bug tracking system (yet), ... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4001973#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...