We have an ear containing a number of ejb jars. Some contain session beans and others contain entity beans. For all of these the lookup (local interface) to get to the entity from the session bean is done using a local reference rather than the straight jndi name. This all works fine. However, when we take the ejb jars out of the ear and deploy them individually it all stops working. Any use of the local reference causes a 'Could not dereference object' NamingException. If we switch to using the jndi name it works again. We would like to continue to use the local reference if possible and since it works while the jars are packaged in an ear it's difficult to understand why it stops working. The local references for the entity are defined in the ejb-jar.xml in the session bean jar. We are running 3.2.4 on Windows (XP) against an informix database.