Maybe your machine components?

I think this could be problem, take a look:

1. My machine at home:
Core 2 duo 3ghz, 4gb ram, jboss 4.2.1 set as 1gb to xms/xmx memory and 512 to perm, like in default conf. in seam docs.

My app starts 19-20seconds.

Same project on:
Dual core 2 3GHz, 2GB ram, jboss 4.2.1, same conf.
Project starts 2min, 15sec.

Conclusion.
I'm on road to move whole project to tomcat and pojo instead of SFSB.
Project starts on both machines 9seconds.

Production server (configuration same as 1.) can hold about 600-800online users. More users kill my jboss.
Maybe tomcat and pojo with jpa will hold many more. That's my idea, but if it work? We will se:)

Some xml parsers might try to validate documents against xml schema. I've had similar problems when I deployed projects on environment with restricted internet access, fixed that by removing schemaLocation from the jpdl pageflow definition.