I installed the JBoss 4.0.3 - installer and encounted the following exception:

Exception in thread "Timer-5"
11:57:01,112 INFO [STDOUT] java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/xml/rpc/handler/MessageContext
11:57:01,113 INFO [STDOUT] at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods0(Native Method)
11:57:01,113 INFO [STDOUT] at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredMethods(Class.java:2365)
11:57:01,114 INFO [STDOUT] at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethod(Class.java:1907)
11:57:01,114 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectStreamClass.getInheritableMethod(ObjectStreamClass.java:1294)
11:57:01,114 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectStreamClass.access$2100(ObjectStreamClass.java:47)
11:57:01,115 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectStreamClass$2.run(ObjectStreamClass.java:405)
11:57:01,115 INFO [STDOUT] at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
11:57:01,116 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectStreamClass.(ObjectStreamClass.java:373)
11:57:01,116 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectStreamClass.lookup(ObjectStreamClass.java:268)
11:57:01,117 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject0(ObjectOutputStream.java:1029)
11:57:01,117 INFO [STDOUT] at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject(ObjectOutputStream.java:291)
11:57:01,118 INFO [STDOUT] at org.jboss.ejb3.cache.simple.StatefulSessionFilePersistenceManager.passivateSession(StatefulSessionFilePersistenceManager.java:324)
11:57:01,118 INFO [STDOUT] at org.jboss.ejb3.cache.simple.SimpleStatefulCache.passivate(SimpleStatefulCache.java:143)
11:57:01,119 INFO [STDOUT] at org.jboss.ejb3.cache.simple.SimpleStatefulCache$SessionTimeoutTask.run(SimpleStatefulCache.java:92)
11:57:01,119 INFO [STDOUT] at java.util.TimerThread.mainLoop(Timer.java:512)
11:57:01,120 INFO [STDOUT] at java.util.TimerThread.run(Timer.java:462)

during statefull session bean passivation. I copied the jboss-jaxrpc.jar file to the lib folder to resolve this issue as follows:

cp ../client/jboss-jaxrpc.jar ../server/default/lib/

Not a big problem, just though might help somebody.