It sounds like you have a problem with your configuration of the factories. I have the same situation and I suspect a problem with the declaration of the factories in the jbpm.cfg.xml. Somewhere the JBoss SOA documentation warns not to mix the two styles of factory declarations. The jBPM apparently had no problem using the JTA Db service, but somewhere along the line, it becomes unable to instantiate the 'other' factories. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4154866#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...