I got the same exception but my case the problem was in not having the getter and the setter for some properties in my pojo and especially inside the inner class of a composite key. However I was induced in error because I took a sample/view from the code related to the project caveatemptor-native-061211 (related to the hold book Hibernate in Action). And, inside the class CategorizedItem.java, there is no getter() and setter() for the attributes categoryId and itemId of the inner class Id.
So, to be able to find where the problem comes from with a such esoteric message, I traced the code to get the first exception. The message from this exception was very clear.
Break point was set on : Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession(); and when you got the exception, dig into it with the watches Window (NetBeans)
-> Inherited
->detailMessage : "Unable to instantiate default tuplizer [org.hibernate.tuple.component.PojoComponentTuplizer]"
->cause : InvocationTargetException
->target : PropertyNotFoundException
->Inherited
-> detailMessage : "Could not find a getter for groupId in class com.yyyy.zzzzz.model.net.Group$Id"
Here to download caveatemptor :
http://downloads.jboss.org/hibernate/caveatemptor/When thing, I've not tested, is to tell to hibernate to access directly to the field if it is possible.
Regards,