I've been debugging for hours on this one and eventually tracked the problem down, which I posted on the JIRA: http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBWS-1716 A workaround UTF-8 fix can be downloaded there for version 1.2.1GA of JBossWS. Setting the system property file.encoding may not work when you have an application which relies on platform-default file encoding. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4056756#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...