Hi chumansky, I'm facing almost the same problem You did two and a half years ago :( In my case it's weblogic and ADF as app server and framework respectivelly, and iReport v5 as a designer app, but the result is the same. I get a "General problem: null" in designer with no stack trace whatsoever. I even started ireport from console (linux, Ubuntu 13.10) to see if one could get an error trace on stdout - but it's a no-go. Did You eventually manage to solve this problem? How?