Full text search ClassCastException: FullTextHibernateSessionProxy cannot be cast to SessionImpl

[ericjava.eric.chiralsoftware.net]

I have a strange situation.  I have an app that uses Hibernate full text search, and it works fine on my machine here, but on the deployment machine, I get:

java.lang.ClassCastException: org.jboss.seam.persistence.FullTextHibernateSessionProxy cannot 
    be cast to org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl

whenever I try to do a full-text search.  I've seen another thread on this same problem but didn't see any conclusions.

Any ideas what could be going on here?

[ericjava.eric.chiralsoftware.net]

I found the cause of the error.  Deploying an app outside the deploy directory results in the lucene-core.jar jar file not being found while creating the EntityManager.  That's bad.

The work-around is simple: deploy the app in the deploy directory.  But that's not so good; I really would like to have all my apps in /srv/jboss or some other place outside the JBoss directory structure.

Is there some better solution to this?  Is this a bug?

This is in JBoss AS 4.2.3 JDK6.

Thanks