So.. I think I have finally narrowed it down with the help of ALR and mopuf. props to you both. it appears that if I annotate the beans with a specific @Stateless.name and use @EJB.beanName things work fine. but, if i let the container use the default name (which I understand to be just the unqualified class name) in conjunction an explicit EJB.beanName the injection does not work properly.. does this make sense? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4198348#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...