OK; the abreviated story. Since May, I've noticed that whenever I try to run a JAVA Jar file, jawas would just hang and use like 98% CPU resources in my VM. On and off, I've tried in desparation to figure out what the issue was (and that included uninstalling and then re-installing JAVA), but to no avail. Finally, I went back to a nearly year old restore point but now my Java works like it suppose to again, but what a heck of a lot of updates. lol

Yeah; I do like to complain. It keeps the blood flowing. lol

Have no idea what happened; it didn't affect anything else so I just lived with it until I had to use a PDF merging program (which needs JAVA). I will add that now my browsing seems much more spiffier too; weird. I don't think I had a virus, but definitely something was being a gremlin. Now happy I am.

Sorry to hear you had to restore that always sucks.
Glad to hear you got it working though.

Java is weird some of my java programs work some do not.Seems like if it's a jar file Java should run it but nope.
I gave up on it and every once in a while i get a Java update and something works different.

Since I do nearly everything but browsing in Win7, it was only a pain but not a big deal Rod. I'm just glad I got my XP VM back to snuff. It took a motivating factor for me to do so though (i.e., I only wanted to run the PDF Java program in my XP VM and not Win7 despite it being an open source program). Again, launching my browser now is even more spiffier so I have little regrets (though I lost over 3 hours due to updates and such; lol).

Weird... I have a non-trivial piece of Java code (a photo sorter) I wrote in Java 1.2 (about 10 years ago) and it still works (never recompiled it since). And I wrote it on Linux, then used it on Windows (with Sun and IBM runtimes), and I'm still using it on Linux with Java 1.6.

Hey Ofnuts; the problem again wasn't the Java program; it was Java itself. Somehow my Java got corrupted causing jawas to use near 100% resources when executing a jar file. Going back in time and then doing all the subsequent updates fixed my issue and I was able to concatenate my PDF files as I needed to inside my XP VM (and in actuality inside Sandboxie).

Rarely talk about Java programs
Someone (probably You), gave the address of gimp.chat
http://www.javaview.de/
It's really interesting -your experience?

I'm a Java developer, and so have hosted about all the existing runtimes since Y2K at one point or another, all this with the auto-updates. And I also have my employer's internal apps that are in Java, come with their own runtime, and are also updated automatically. And I never got a "corrupted" Java runtime.

Maybe so Ofnuts, but somehow something was amiss with my install and even uninstall/re-install didn't fix my issue. Not sure what happened, but all is well with my VM now so happy I am. It could have been a rogue jar file at some point around May, but, I don't remember running in Jar files then. Again, the problem only occurred when I ran a Jar file and did so so rarely that it only came to a head when I needed to run the PDF merger program (link below). I did try using Ghostscript first and found several folks who did this and shared their command line stuff, but that didn't work for me and I stopped pursueing Ghostscript.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfsam/