This is really weird. Are you installing portal on AS copy that you already had or you are using bundled distro? If former is the case, please download the bundled distro and see if you get the same error. For the later case, please check classpath etc. We verify that bundled distro as well as simply portal zip start fine and we have not seen complaint from other users. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4179251#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...