I have implemented eager fetching with a parent-to-child (many-to-many) and child-to-grandchild (many-to-many) relationship setup. After all entities are created and I retrieve the grandchildren with EAGER fetching, I am able to iterate through the list of grandchildren and view the grandchildren with it's related children and the children's related parents BEFORE leaving the JBoss server to return the results to a remote client. AFTER leaving the server and the remote client receives the results I iterate through the same grandchildren and see that the parent does not contain the same children as was present before the data left the server. I have tested this on JBoss 4.2.2.GA and 5.0.0.Beta4 and both have failed. Please see the provided JBoss forum reference which has the test code.