I am seeing strange problem with entities being committed to the database automatically even though I have the flush mode set to manual in the page.xml fragment:

<begin-conversation join="true" flush-mode="manual"/>

In my facelet I have the following:

<s:decorate id="email" template="/layout/edit.xhtml">
 <ui:define name="label">Email:</ui:define>
 <h:inputText tabindex="7" validator="#{globalUserHome.validateEmail}"
     required="true" requiredMessage="Email required"
     value="#{globalUserHome.instance.email}">
   <a4j:support reRender="email" ajaxSingle="true" event="onblur"/>
  </h:inputText>
</s:decorate>

public void validateEmail(FacesContext context, UIComponent toValidate, Object value) {
        log.info("validateEmail begin");
        String email (String) value;
        if (((isManaged() && !originalEmail.equals(email)) || !isManaged())) {
            if (emailExists(email)) {
                FacesMessage message = new FacesMessage("Email address: " + email + " already exists.");
                context.addMessage(toValidate.getClientId(context), message);
            }
        }

        if(!IDSUtil.emailValid(email)){
            FacesMessage message = new FacesMessage("Email address: " + email + " is not valid.");
            context.addMessage(toValidate.getClientId(context), message);
        }

        log.info("validateEmail end");
}

The entity fragement for this field is:

@Entity
@EntityListeners(JPAValidateListener.class)
@Table(name = "GLOBAL_USERS", uniqueConstraints = {
        @UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "EMAIL"),
        @UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "LOGIN_NAME") })
public class GlobalUser extends AbstractEntity implements java.io.Serializable {
...

 @Email(message="Email is in an invalid format") @NotNull
    @Column(name = "EMAIL", unique = true, nullable = false)
    public String getEmail() {
        return this.email;
    }

    public void setEmail(String email) {
        this.email = email;
    }
...
}

What is happening is sometimes after validateEmail is executed I am seeing an update query fire in the server log:

12:10:28,359 INFO  [GlobalUserHome] Could not find result for email: qqqqaaa@gmail.com
12:10:28,359 INFO  [GlobalUserHome] emailExists end
12:10:28,359 INFO  [GlobalUserHome] validateEmail end
12:10:28,421 INFO  [STDOUT] Hibernate: 
    update
        DPATERSON_MASTER1.GLOBAL_USERS 
    set
        EMAIL=?,
        LAST_MODIFIED=?,
        LOGIN_NAME=?,
        POD_ID=? 
    where
        GLOBAL_USERS_ID=?

This does not happen all the time, about 50% of the time validateEmail fires and the entity is left in a dirty state as it should be because of flushMode=MANUAL.

Has anyone else seen this kind of behavior or have any tips as to how I can debug it?  Seam is a bit of a black box here and it's difficult to see exactly what's going on.  I don't want any changes to the database until the user executes an action to commit the entity.  Especially in this case, the validation may fail, finding a duplicate email address, but the entity is still commited causing a constraint violation error on commit, very bad. I am using Seam 2.0.3.CR1.