Just a little more info on this. I believe we have successfully worked around this problem. However, I've isolated the cause a bit further. It appears that if I start an MBean that spawns a thread before any of the Spring injected MBeans, the stated problem would occur. Further, it appears that the real culprit is that secondary thread stuck in the findBootstrapClass method. For some reason, that call never returns and because it is going through the synchronized method it blocks everyone else. That findBootstrapClass call never returns. I'm fairly certain that I don't have a classpath problem because simply changing around the dependency hierarchy makes things better. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4161381#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...