Is the application client module packaged in an .ear along with the ejb-jar? Is the .ear deployed to the server? If so, there's an intra-application relationship between the modules that is relevant to the default EJB dependency mapping.
What's the issue though? If you explicitly want the remote EJB dependency in the application client to be mapped to an EJB component in a particular application, then assign it the JNDI name for that Remote EJB component. The default mapping based only on Remote interface type is not standardized beyond application boundaries.
[Message sent by forum member 'ksak']
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=470938