As a follow up, this was caused by problems with dependencies that caused classloader problems that resulted in no orb instance being found from within the app. jboss-iiop.jar was being incorrectly included in the ear. So, the classname to use was in jndi, but the factory returned null. Fixing my broken dependencies for the ear resolved the problem. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4059706#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...