A few times now I’ve tried to use ASM 2.2.3 in an application that was utilizing Hibernate. It doesn’t work the way you’d hope. The easiest solution I’ve found is to remove the CGLib and ASM (1.5.3), which come with Hibernate and instead replace them with a copy of cglib-nodep. Using the no dependencies version of CGLib you can safely use the newer ASM without conflict.

I’ve heard this problem was occurring for Spring users before version 2.5. The two places I’ve encountered it were alongside Groovy and today with CXF.  This solution worked in both instances and I am now using both Groovy and CXF alongside Hibernate without any Java exceptions being thrown.