Ben, Trying to understand the problem here, assuming an AS restart leaves the FCL .dat file in an inconsistent state, wouldn't the loader.remove () throw an exception anyway? And this would propagate up, since the remove() method in the ActivationInterceptor does throw an Exception ... -- Manik Surtani Lead, JBoss Cache JBoss, a division of Red Hat Email: manik(a)jboss.org Telephone: +44 7786 702 706 MSN: manik(a)surtani.org Yahoo/AIM/Skype: maniksurtani