Oh no I feel really stupid but I think I found the problem to be a bug in my custom hibernation validation. I wasn't thinking about how my hibernate validator was working on an update. I guess what had me fooled was that I didn't recognize the org.hibernate.validator.InvalidStateException as related to my custom validator since I had assumed the stack trace or exception would give me a clue that it was in my own validator class. ugh. I really should have thought more about my custom validator. Thanks for looking at this issue for me anyway, I really appreciate it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4123328#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...