Consider the following usecase.
The is an ear containing several ejb modules.
One of them has a ejb2.1 timed cmp entity bean.
If the timer associated with the bean fires during application deployment unexpected errors happen, cause other beans could be not already deployed.
This breaks application logic.
The problem happens both while server starts/stops and while hot ear's redeployment.
It would be much better if timers began to fire after the application had completely deployed.

I've also experienced a similar problem with undeployment.
Timer code was executed about a half of second after the undeployment had begun. Several ejb modules had been already undeployed by that moment.
I guess that timer actually fired exactly before the undeployment had begun but the ejbTimeout executed later due to threads syncronization issue.
Please, try also to investigate if this can be avoided.

PS
Some kind of patch or workaround for 4.0.5 (or even a hint about how this can be fixed) would be greatly appreciated.