I retried this with AS 5.0.0.CR2 and JBossWS 3.0.4 and it appears to work . . . most of the time. The NPE is no longer generated if I restart with the war file still deployed However, two other things go wrong: i) I get the following warnings during booting as end points are published | . . . | 15:22:52,332 INFO [DefaultEndpointRegistry] register: jboss.ws:context=ws-c11,endpoint=Activation Service | 15:22:52,335 INFO [DefaultEndpointRegistry] register: jboss.ws:context=ws-c11,endpoint=Registration Service | 15:22:52,354 WARN [AbstractServerConfig] Unable to calculate 'WebServicePort', using default '8080' | 15:22:52,358 WARN [AbstractServerConfig] Unable to calculate 'WebServicePort', using default '8080' | . . . | A block of messages is generated for each war file ans there is one message ffor each end point. ii) sometimes the server hangs during deployment of the end points and never reaches start up (well,I waited 5 minutes). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4184236#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...