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It appears that an application built on the netbeans platform and bundled in a ZIP distribution (by selecting 'Build ZIP Distribution') requires the user to modify the 'etc/app.conf' file's jdkhome property in order for the application to even run. I DO NOT think that it is user friendly for a windows user to be required to run app.exe on the command line with the jdkhome switch set or to modify this property. The user expects to be able to double click on the exe after unbundling the distribution. Rather than requiring the jdkhome property to be set, why not look for the JAVA_HOME property or check which java is currently on the user's path?
Radim do you still work on Win32 launchers? On Unix, the harness' generated script does not set $jdkhome, but nbexec looks for Java in the path if necessary. Perhaps nbexec.exe works differently for some reason?
I did a few changes in nbexec.exe for NB6 and some of them are related - #74497 and later fixed #106357. Basically the latest JDK/JRE (at least 1.5 version) is now used if valid jdkhome is not specified in .conf file or passed through command line. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 74497 ***