I tried it - and it worked with the wstools. BUT ... Besides the custom exception I have to work with attachments. With the definition of attachments in place I really had a hard time with the wstools. I tried really hard - but I had to step back to the wscompile tool of the JWSDP which just worked without fiddling. I wanted to solve the custom exception issue though so I investigated once more and compared the generated artifacts/descriptors of the two tools. And I finally found the difference - it was in the jaxrpc-mapping.xml: JWSDP - wscompile<root-type-qname xmlns:typeNS="http://myservice.mycompany.com/myservice">type... JBoss - wstools<anonymous-type-qname xmlns:typeNS="http://myservice.mycompany.com/myservice">type... I don't know who to blame. The generated "root-type-qname" tag of the wscompile tool looks fishy if you compare it to the other tags in the same mapping file - and in fact JBoss can't seem to deal with it. Replace that line with the line the wstools generate and the warnings are gone and the custom exception mechanism is working. :) That's the solution to my problem now. Not a beautiful solution - but it works and I can't invest more time at the moment. Hope this helps somebody ... Bernhard View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4085744#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...