Gavin wrote the class but I had a glass of wine next to him when he did it, so that qualifies me as author as well :) Let's move back this thread to the Hibernate Forum (the one you started already). Long story short, your analysis is correct except that Search.createFTEM will not return just the downcasted version since the proxy is not a FTEMImpl. There is clearly a bug becauser the proxy does not implement EventSource but I would like to understand why it works in DVDStore before fixing that. Anyway let's move that discussion here: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=982853 View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4121880#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...