It seems to me that the benefits of a extended persistence context with a stateful session bean are lost when having to deal with the issue of a sfsb being passivated by the container. If a sfsb has a reference to a managed entity, the sfsb is passivated, and then the sfsb is activated, you may still run into Lazy Initialization exceptions because the entity is no longer managed, unless you explicitly merge the entity back into the persistence context. What is the best way to handle this issue? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4067149#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...