No idea why you are seeing it and I'm not. Another thing we could do is actually debug the perm gen failure and see what's causing it in your environment.
Run up jconsole while the tests are running and watch the graphs rise. Assuming you just see perm gen increasing until it fails you can get a heap dump with jmap -dump:file=app.bin ProcessNumber And you can look inside it with jhat -J-Xmx512m app.bin Point you browser at http://localhost:7000/ There's a lot of info in there so if you do go down this route let me know and I can point out what to look for. Simon
