I have simple seam/icefaces project setup in netbeans that exibits this same behaviour. Platform is JBoss 4.05., Seam 1.21. with ICEfaces 1.5.3.

A simple form with several <ice:inputText> components used to collect data. When partialSubmit="true" is defined on the component focus is lost and I have to manually click in the next inputText field to enter more data. I too had to disable partialSubmit so in fact, I just migrated the for to standard JSF with a submit button.

I have the same problem with my application. In my case I have a dataTable that contains inputText fields. After a partialSubmit some of the inputText fields are set to be not rendered on the row which causes the browser to resize the table which results in the focus being lost. I don't think this is SEAM related and suspect it could be solved by using a window.setTimeout call in the javascript after returning from the partial submit or forcing the browser to render by using the trick to change the display mode of an element to none and back to block.

Attempted to reproduce using the seam-comp-showcase.ear demo from ICEfaces.org. Closest compatible test was the Text Entry page, by typing some text into one of the partial submit fields, and clicking to another input field on the page. In the test cases performed focus was maintained properly, whereas the forum poster said it was not. Therefore marked 'Cannot Reproduce' and closed.

Tested using Seam 1.6 on Firefox, IE6, IE7 with JBoss 4.0.5GA under Java 5.0 and Java 6.0.

May be related to ICE-1247?

Please retest using the Seam/ICEfaces Comp. Showcase sample app.

This issue needs to be analyzed along with other Seam related issues and distilled to root causes.