Good news !!! It works now :) The application deploys fine without errors. I havent tried any of the functionality of the same application that you mailed me. Here's the changes that i had to do to get it working(point#2 below is which got it working) : 1) Removed the commons-logging-xxx.jar from the WEB-INF/lib folder of the application. Having this in the application's lib folder causing some known exceptions (however this wasn't why you were getting the java.lang.ClassCastException: org.hibernate.search.event.FullTextIndexEventListener). 2) The hibernate-annotations.jar file which comes with JBoss-4.2.1 is of Version: 3.2.1.GA. This jar contains the org.hibernate.search..... package. This package (one of its sub-package) contains the FullTextIndexEventListener class. However the version of hibernate-annotations that your application is using is of Version: 3.3.0.GA. If you look at the contents of this jar the org.hibernate.search package does not exist. Looking at the Hibernate download site (http://www.hibernate.org/6.html), this package now comes bundled through the "Hibernate Search" project, which has its own jar named hibernate-search.jar (the version is 3.0.0.GA). So, your application should also include this jar. I copied the hibernate-search.jar to the WEB-INF/lib folder of your application and started the deployment. It went past this error and ran into a class not found exception for a Lucene related class. Apparently, you also need the lucene-core-2.2.0.jar that comes bundled with hibernate-search project, in the application classpath. So i copied this lucene-core-2.2.0.jar to the WEB-INF/lib folder of the application. Then redeployed the application. Everything went fine and the application deployed successfully. I will mail you the modified war file so that you can look at the changes. In the meantime i will try to figure out why the search event listener functionality (which as far as i know is optional) was being used by Hibernate even though the application wasn't explicitly setting the requisite property. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4097525#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...