I've done quite a bit a research on this with no luck, but all the answers have a tendency to point toward the session context settings in the config file. What is odd is that I get a session connection the very first time I hit the page (and therefore, a successful result set), but then when I reload I get the following exception: org.hibernate.SessionException: Session is closed!

Here are my config settings that are not DB connection string related:

<property name="hibernate.show_sql">false</property>
<property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect</property>        
<property name="hibernate.current_session_context_class">thread</property>
<property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class">org.hibernate.cache.NoCacheProvider</property>
<property name="hibernate.cache.use_query_cache">false</property>
<property name="hibernate.cache.use_minimal_puts">false</property>

Here is an example of a call I make that produces the situation I described above.

public T get(int id) {
    session.beginTransaction();
    T type;
    try {
        type = getTypeClass().cast(session.get(getTypeClass(), id));
    } catch (ClassCastException classCastException) {
        throw new ClassCastException(classCastException.getMessage());
    }
    session.getTransaction().commit();
    return type;
}

The session variable reference is to a static field that contains the current session. All of the session connection details are textbook reference manual. For example, here is my Hibernate session utility:

import org.hibernate.SessionFactory;
import org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration;

public class HibernateSessionFactoryUtil {

    private static final SessionFactory sessionFactory = buildSessionFactory();

    private static SessionFactory buildSessionFactory() {
        try {
            return new Configuration().configure().buildSessionFactory();
        } catch (Throwable ex) {
            System.err.println("Initial SessionFactory creation failed." + ex);
            throw new ExceptionInInitializerError(ex);
        }
    }

    public static SessionFactory getSessionFactory() {
        return sessionFactory;
    }
}