I'm having a weird issue and Im sure its due to something stupid. I have an account object that I load via hibernate on sign on and store in servlet's HttpSession object and closing the sesison, thus making it detached. When I need the contents of this object modified I retrieve it from there, mutate it, and try to persist the changes but I cannot. if i use update() or lock() or replicate() I get a NonUniqueObjectException and I can guarantee that the session does not have anything in it, because I call this right after beginning the transaction. If I use merge() I get StaleObjectStateException. If I dont do anything and simply commit the transaction, the changes are not saved. What am I missing? Any tips? Thanks for your help.

wrong order, try it the simpler way:
1) retrieve it
2) begin transaction
3) merge it to session (reattach, use merge())
4) apply changes on the return value of merge()
5) commit transaction, close session

And please use the correct forum ;-)

thanks for the reply.

I've tried it and it still gives me StaleObjectStateException. I think I figured what the problem is...in my account object I have a couple of country objects that are all the same. I think this is whats causing the NonUniqueObjectException...is it possible to associate the same object for 3 different properties with hibernate?

sure it's possible;
I'm *guessing* as you didn't post a stacktrace and which versions you're using, but you might have a problem with the cascade policies.
Try to avoid automatic cascade, persist each one yourself (once per different primary key) and then associate them. This shouldn't be needed, but see if it helps.