What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Clone this sample project: https://github.com/retronym/specs-bug 2. sbt test 3. observe error "Could not create an instance of BrokenTest" without cause.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Expect stack trace and message related to: https://github.com/retronym/specs-bug/blob/master/src/test/scala/BrokenTest.scala#L4

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

Specs 1.6.7-SNAPSHOT, SBT 0.7.5.RC0, Scala 2.8.1

Please provide any additional information below.

You'll need to specifically catch InvocationTarketException after calling newInstance, and throw the targetException.

Done. Thanks for the analysis Jason.

Still needs a small change: https://github.com/retronym/specs/commit/ec2464c61b439ee80c857553eefbc1f4de259fbb

Previous change was incomplete. Here is the completed topic branch: https://github.com/retronym/specs/commits/issue-165

The changes you made look fine to me, but I don't have time to do a full inspection on the code right now, so I just merged in the changes (with an additional getFullStackAsString as an implicit on Throwables)

Issue 166 has been merged into this issue.