False alarm! After doing a clean deploy to jboss, it's working as expected (writing 'OBJECT_CREATE', etc. to the database, not a string ordinal value). Something must be wrong with my Seam "ant explode" task which I expected to deploy the new entity .class files to the server. In any case, JBoss/EJB3 is working as it ought to. Sorry for the wasted bandwidth! View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4073403#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...