I am using jboss 3.0.1 with Jetty, jdk1.4 on Windows 2000. The problem I am having is that when I start a UserTransaction from the service thread of a Servlet, XA Resources (such as the XA Oracle and XA Firebird Datasources) that are retrieved using JNDI from threads spawned by the service thread are not enlisted in the transaction. I have looked over the spec, and I believe this should work as long as being(), commit() and rollback() are only called from the service thread. It's too much code to include, but here is the idea:

in service method...
InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
UserTransaction trans = (UserTransaction)ctx.lookup("java:comp/UserTransaction");
trans.begin();

call method on object which spawns new Thread...
Context initialContext = new InitialContext();
dataSource = (DataSource)initialContext.lookup( "java:/XAOracleDS" );
Connection conn = dataSource.getConnection();
do work....
conn.close();

return to service thread...
trans.commit();

The second, seemingly unrelated problem, is that I cannot access the comp/env references created in web.xml and jboss-web.xml.
The behavior is the same whether I include the UserTransaction calls or not. The transaction is left open until it either times out or jboss is shut down, at which point it finally commits. Any ideas? I searched the forums and newsgroups and can't find anything. Thanks.