I'm having this same problem. I've upgraded from 7274 to 7312 (on ubuntu) and I lost the ability to import maven projects with multiple modules. Here is my parent pom.xml: http://svn.codehaus.org/trails/trunk/trails/pom.xml You can download the whole project from there. status update: I'm using release 7.0.1 (build 7634). If I replace references to ${*.version} with version numbers, I does import OK The "soft links" workaround also works, but then I have to create files like: ~/.m2/repository/hsqldb/hsqldb/${hsqldb.version}/hsqldb-${hsqldb.version}.pom ~/.m2/repository/hsqldb/hsqldb/${hsqldb.version}/hsqldb-${hsqldb.version}.jar Which is not only painful to do, it also doesn't let me use more than 1 different version for the same library. I still think that Idea should be able to import projects that are using "<properties>" to define libraries version numbers. Maven 2.0.7 does validate the project. see http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/IDEADEV-22126