There is a fair amount of effort required to create a launch configuration.
In particular, a long list of external jars often must be added.
The clear intention of the JBOSS AS IDE is to be able to save, share and generally re-use these configurations.
Sharing is further supported by the use of VARIABLE macros in the path of the jars.
The IDE adds a project to the Eclipse workspace and the launch configuration is also saved to a file
When attempting to re-use the configuration, the IDE detects the existence of these files since it will not allow the creation of a second configuration with the same name. BUT IT WILL NOT RUN THE EXISTING CONFIGURATION.
This issue was resolved previously in an earlier version of Eclipse:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=12898
I recently reported it on http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.newcomer/msg17939.html and worked with IBM engineers in Canada to determine that the issue exists in the JBOSS IDE plugin, not in Eclipse itself.