Using a manual copy and delete mechanism with the server\default\deploy folder the sample ear (attached) caused an outofmemory error eventually after 90 repetitions.
The min and max heap settings were configured as : -Xms128m -Xmx512m
The time delay after dropping/deploying the ear at each repetition was set to 10 minutes after which the ear is deleted/undeployed followed by a 10 second sleep till the next deploy cycle.

I find this behaviour strange because http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1319 is supposed to have fixed this issue.

The lines from the server.log surrounding the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError are as follows:

2005-09-24 06:04:31,413 DEBUG [org.jboss.mx.loading.UnifiedClassLoader] New jmx UCL with url null
2005-09-24 06:04:31,413 DEBUG [org.jboss.mx.loading.RepositoryClassLoader] setRepository, repository=org.jboss.mx.loading.HeirarchicalLoaderRepository3@e51e50, cl=org.jboss.mx.loading.UnifiedClassLoader3@c90207

2005-09-24 06:04:33,057 ERROR [org.apache.commons.digester.Digester] Begin event threw error
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
2005-09-24 06:04:33,057 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[jboss.web].[localhost].[/XMPVXE0Partion/VXE1_ContentTestService]] StandardWrapper.Throwable
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
2005-09-24 06:04:33,057 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[jboss.web].[localhost].[/XMPVXE0Partion/VXE1_ContentTestService]] Servlet /XMPVXE0Partion/VXE1_ContentTestService threw load() exception
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
2005-09-24 06:04:33,072 DEBUG [org.jboss.mx.loading.UnifiedClassLoader] New jmx UCL with url null

The following two jars were added to the server\default\lib folder.
commons-validator.jar — version 1.1.3
struts.jar ---- version 1.2.4