I Have an app that works fine in 2.0.2.GA running on jboss 4.2.0.GA
When I change my maven pom to use seam 2.1.0.SP1, I get strange errors. I compared the EAR file differences and the only differences are the following
Normal Differences:

1) WEB-INF\lib - seam-debug, seam-ui,  from 2.0.2.GA to 2.1.0.SP1
            - added seam-jul-2.1.0.SP1
            - richfaces-impl, richfaces-ui from 3.1.4.GA to 3.2.2.GA      

earfile\lib - jboss-seam from 2.0.2.GA to 2.1.0.SP1  

Suprising differences:

earfile\lib - jboss-el-2.0.1.GA to jboss-el-1.0_02.CR2 (surprising because version regressing)

WEB-INF\lib - jsf-facelets-1.1.14 to jsf-facelets-1.1.15.B1 (surprising becuase of beta version)

All other files (except for pom artifacts) were identical). Why would the following errors occur?

1) on startup, the themebean tries to get a cookie through facesContext. in 2.0.2.GA, no problem, in 2.1.0.SP1, facesContext is null. Also, it seems to go into init() 2 times at startup whereas in 2.0.2.GA, only once?!? here is code

@Stateful
@Name("themeBean")
@Scope(org.jboss.seam.ScopeType.SESSION)
@Startup
public class ThemeBean implements ThemeLocal  {
        
.
.
@Create 
        public void init() {
                String indexString = getCookie();
                int index;
                try {
                        index = Integer.parseInt(indexString);
                        setTheme(index);
                }
.
.

public String getCookie() {             
                FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
                Cookie[] cookie = ((HttpServletRequest)ctx.getExternalContext().getRequest()).getCookies();
.
.

2) I have a selectBooleanCheckbox with a function as a valueChangeListener. in 2.0.2.GA, the function gets called when the checkbox is changed, in 2.1.0.SP1, it does not

        <div id="filterActor"><h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="vwMyCases"
                                                immediate="true" onclick="submit()"
                                                value="#{caseSearchOptionsDTO.viewMyCases}"
                                                valueChangeListener="#{caseManagement.toggleMyCases}">
                                        </h:selectBooleanCheckbox></div>

Is there something drastically different in the version upgrade that would require code changes? Why would there be such incompatibilities between the versions. As I described before, there are not to many surprising archive modifications - just execution differences. Why??