serialisation problem?

[Greg Matthews]

dear all,   we're got a strange problem whereby a large (141K) String return value from a stateless session bean is turning up at the client as an empty string.   this happens whether we call the ejb method from a jsp or a java client external to orion.   it has also happened in other ejb methods during testing where a master-detail type record suddenly stopped being retrievable when the total size of all data in xml format as a String exceeded a certain size.   is there an upper limit on the size of variables that can be serialised?   does anyone have any ideas on why this might be happening?   thanks, greg