When deploy an EAR that contains EJB3 MDB, you may receive NoInitialContextException on the deployment of other EJB3 elements. In my particular case, I have a persistence.xml file that configures the EntityManager. The deployment of this persistence.xml throws the NoInitialContextException. Depending on the contents of the EAR, it may be other deployment unit that is throwing this exception.

Tracing into the deployment code shows that the problem is with the latest code change in the org.jboss.ejb3.EJBContainer class. This class has method named getInitialContext(). In the previous release it returns a newly constructed InitialConext object. In the 4.2.2.GA, it returns the shared static InitialContext object from the InitialContextFactory class. The MDB deployer class org.jboss.ejb3.mdb.MessagingContainer.getJMSProviderAdapter() method calls this method to obtain a InitialContext object and closes this InitialContext object after using it. This results in that the shared InitialContext object been closed prematurely as it is used later on to deploy other EJB3 units, such as the persistence.xml file in my case.

Suggested fix:
Change the org.jboss.ejb3.mdb.MessagingContainer.getJMSProviderAdapter() method as follows:
Change the line (around line # 586):
Context context = getInitialContext();
to:
Context context = initialContextProperties == null ? new InitialContext() : new InitialContext(initialContextProperties);

The above suggested change is copied from the previous implementation of the EJBContainer.getInitialContext() method.