I heard that an entity bean is always locked whenever it's involved (not sure what "involved" means, anyone know?) in a transaction. So if one transaction calls into an entity bean, it's locked until that transaction completes. So if any other transaction tries to access it, it blocks until the first transaction finishes. Is that correct? I thought that would only happen if you specify isolation="serialized" as the isolation level. I have isolation="committed", is it still blocking always? We're seeing a lot of deadlocks (timeouts) and trying to analyze the locking that is going on to get it fixed. Thanks, Joel Shellman Chief Software Architect http://www.ants.com/90589781