Here's what happens:

JMX reports that a given queue has messages in it, but attempts to call
consumer.receive return no messages. When the failure condition begins,
calling consumer.receive may return a few messages, but less than it should.
This behavior occurs regardless of whether we include a timeout on
consumer.receive. My test class tends to reproduce this problem with a clean
data directory in under 5 minutes. Once the problem has been produced, it
tends to happen faster on subsequent runs.

I am not enough of an expert in HornetQ to determine where the root cause of
the problem is, or even if I am abusing HornetQ in some way that could be
easily remedied to work around this issue. I have extracted an integration test
from my larger spring based project into the jms/transactional example that
is packaged as part of the base distribution.