I've spent some time on this and I think we should discuss something more before actually modifying the code. My opinion on JBWS-2187 is the following: Handlers added multiple times An easy fix for this could of course be to force the HandlerResolverImpl to clear its handler map when the proxy is being created; this could be done, as suggested, calling initBindingHanlderChain(true) from the ClientImpl. However I think the fact that handlers are added multiple time is just a piece of a more general issue which is that config-file and config-name should not be meant as port configurations (at least imho). As a matter of fact, you end up modifying the metadata when setting those parameters and of course metadata are scoped to the service. It's not only a matter of handlers already set up, the config name too, for example, is already set to "Standard WS Security Client" when the second port is created in the described scenario, before the setConfigName method is invoked. Btw clients are nevertheless allowed to change handlers for a given port through the binding and that should not affect port being created later, thus this is a config file/name setup issue only. Thread safety The concern here is that multiple thread using their own port instances could concurrently access the handler's map in the HandlerResolver, right? We can think about technical means of preventing problems in those scenarios, but AFAIK the handler resolver is meant to be scoped to the Service and we can't change that. And again I can see this threading issue only when changing the config-file/name, changing the handler chain from client side through port.getBinding().setHandlerChain(...) is an harmless operation. What do you think about this? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4153741#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...