Code in ldap.core.LdapTemplate is wrong, because while(results.hasMore()) is inside try/catch(PartialResultException), and exception breaks while loop, but it shouldn't. The try/catch(PartialResultException) should be located inside the while loop. Like this: public void search(SearchExecutor se, NameClassPairCallbackHandler handler, DirContextProcessor processor) { DirContext ctx = contextSource.getReadOnlyContext(); NamingEnumeration results = null; RuntimeException ex = null; try { processor.preProcess(ctx); results = se.executeSearch(ctx); log.debug("results are="+results); while(true) { try { if (!results.hasMore()) break; NameClassPair result = (NameClassPair) results.next(); log.debug("result="+result); log.debug("result="+result.getName()+", "+result.getClassName()); handler.handleNameClassPair(result); } catch (PartialResultException e) { if (ignorePartialResultException) { log.debug("PartialResultException encountered and ignored: ["+e.getResolvedName()+"] "+ e.getRemainingName()); } else { ex = LdapUtils.convertLdapException(e); } continue; } catch (NullPointerException npe) { break; } } } catch (NameNotFoundException e) { // The base context was not found, which basically means // that the search did not return any results. Just clean up and // exit. // Note that this may present problems if a DirContextProcessor was // supplied - there's no guarantee that the postProcess() operation // will go well after a NamingException has been thrown. It is // however quite possible that information will be available for // retrieval either way. e.printStackTrace(); } catch (javax.naming.NamingException e) { ex = LdapUtils.convertLdapException(e); } finally { try { processor.postProcess(ctx); } catch (javax.naming.NamingException e) { if (ex == null) { ex = LdapUtils.convertLdapException(e); } else { // We already had an exception from above and should ignore // this one. log.debug("Ignoring Exception from postProcess, " + "main exception thrown instead", e); } } closeContextAndNamingEnumeration(ctx, results); // If we got an exception it should be thrown. if (ex != null) { throw ex; } } } see also: http://jira.springframework.org/browse/SEC-832