A number of people in my team have run into intermittent issues where when the Server is started, the deploy folder that is specified in the Server "Deployment" tab doesn't seem to ever get added to the list of locations that JBoss looks for stuff to deploy.

We're using a custom deploy folder (it's an ordinary directory on a local drive).

The normal course of operations is that JBoss starts up successfully and outputs the following line:

19:41:06,117 INFO  [Server] JBoss (MX MicroKernel) [4.2.3.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_3_GA date=200807181417)] Started in 15s:550ms

Then, if things work successfully, a few seconds later the following output appears and my EAR is deployed (my custom deploy folder is "C:/export/spare/Devl-JBoss/development/dev/deploy"):

19:41:14,948 INFO  [EARDeployer] Init J2EE application: file:/C:/export/spare/Devl-JBoss/development/dev/deploy/Foo.ear/

If things don't work successfully, the second line never appears and the server just sits there without any of the deployed resources being available.

Not being familiar with how the JBoss Tools integration works, it looks to me that JBoss Tools is somehow waiting for the Server to start up fully before adding the deploy folder and in the cases where it doesn't work, it never notices that the Server has started up so it never adds the deploy folder.

I've tried setting the server logging to TRACE level and when it isn't working, the custom deploy folder doesn't appear anywhere in the log output.

This issue is intermittent, I haven't been able to identify any specific scenarios under which it is triggered.
When it does happen, sometimes restarting the server will resolve it, but other times we need to do a "Clean" publish to the server, and sometimes even that will not fix the issue (more than once deleted my workspace .metadata and started clean to get it working).