I guess we already know that this would not be an AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler based on where it's called (since in such a case, it would have gone thru the "else if (targetIsDirectReplyProducingHandler)" in the superclass' createHandler() method), BUT I wonder if we should be nervous about any refactoring in the future. It may be sufficient to add a javadoc comment like "this should never be invoked when the targetObject is an ARPMH), or to be extra safe, we could add a !instanceof check here; that latter option seems like unnecessary overhead though. Maybe I'm just being overly cautious anyways.