Not all named parameters have been set, in query with colon

You seem to have the free time to put more effort into something that is solved with a simple query.setParameter(myStringContainingAColon). The way to "deal" with this issue has been extensively discussed in the Hibernate JIRA issue you linked to and it involves a new query parser engine. I have no idea where your "flat tire" analogy comes from, there is nothing "odd" about using bind parameters to escape strings that a query parser doesn't like.

So, unless you want to contribute to this open source software, case closed.

No, I'm not proposing to work on a port of that parser, I'm suggesting this is an issue, and that it should be dealt with. If I can't do that without getting an "do it yourself" answer, then I'll stop giving response here, and try finding another O/R-Mapper that satisfies my needs. I appreciate the work being put into NHibernate, but not all users of open source solutions have the time to become developers of those solutions as well.

Your first response was like telling me to fix a flat tire by buying a new one. This might be a solution, but it doesn't seem to be a good one. You closed this with a "Not an issue" resolution, but it sounds more like it's too complicated to do right away.

The "solution" is a completely new query parser in Hibernate 3.x. Are you proposing to work on a port of the parser to .NET?

So basically in order to avoid a colon to be treated as a named parameter, I have to use named parameters? Seems a bit odd...

Did you try looking at how they solved the issue in H3?
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HB-1042
I didn't, but from what they write, they came up with a solution.

Use parameter binding if you want to escape strings.