Thanks for the tip alessio. Unfortunately, it didn't really help. What I discovered, after some searching, is that injection doesn't work in 4.2.2GA and that the method I was using was correct in this case (5.0 is supposed to fix this issue, so I may upgrade to the beta eventually, after I get a better grasp of why things work in general). But I needed one more step: reference the size() for a set contained within the retrieved db object while in the current transaction. This eliminated all errors on the server side. The problem now is that the same set within that db object cannot be returned to the remote caller because of some problem converting from the set to XML (which causes some kind of infinite xml loop). I can return a value from the db object, but not the object. See http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=13670&start=15. I'll move this discussion over to the EJB3.0 forum now, as this appears to be specific to that part of JBOSS 4.2.2GA. Thanks again. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4117751#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...