Problem with Java

I have just closed a chapter on a day long horror story, along similar lines.

For some reason my JRE v6.0 update 15 stopped working.

No java application would run, despite some "promising" disk activity. Nor would the Java Control Panel open up.

Tried several cycles of the very good advice in this thread (Revo Uninstaller, JavaRa, etcetera) all to no avail.

Continued to plod along in the search engines, and fortuitiously discovered a reference to disabling "ClearType".

http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=344456

Once that was done, lo and behold eveything worked! All Java apps worked and the Java CP was fine.

Enable "ClearType" and it would all stop again.

Having ClearType permanently disabled was not an option.

On a hope, rather than a hunch, recalling that ClearType can be tweaked, I downloaded the Microsoft ClearType Power Toy:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

And retuned by ClearType parametrisation.

Fortuitously, after that, everything was back to Normal with Java working as expected.

Clearly there are vulnerabilities in the Windows implementation that Sun really needs to pay attention to...

Luckily, an "11th hour reprieve" - I was on the verge of doing a scorched earth rebuild...

For the Search engines: Java Applications Won't Wont Work Java Control Panel CP Doesn't Does not Open ClearType Tuner Power Toy Problem Solution Workaround

 

OK, thankyou.

Glad to be here. :major

 

Some further resources:

Description of alternate font smoothing for XP:

GDI++ Font Smoothing

http://lifehacker.com/5190607/gdi%2B%2B-adds-os-x-font-rendering-to-windows
http://estevaomascarenhas.com/blog/2009/01/howto-1-mac-osx-font-smoothing-in-windows/
http://vladg.com/2009/03/make-windows-fonts-look-as-smooth-as-mac-os-x-fonts/

The latter two have a convenient up-to-date download link for the application.

The Developer's website:

http://drwatson.nobody.jp/gdi++/index-en.html

The Developer's latest builds:

http://free.flop.jp/gdi++/upload.php?page=1

To use GDI++ you first disable ClearType, and then run GDI++ and enable it.

One very interesting aspect of GDI++ is that it appears to totally break the v6.0.x JRE - neither will Java Applications, nor the Java Control Panel will run.

That would be useful for Sun Java Engineering at least...

 

FYI,

Please refer to this freshly reported Java Bug:

Bug ID: 6877831 - Microsoft ClearType font-smoothing crashes Java JRE v6.0 with no error messages
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6877831

Best regards,

 

Nice work, Core Share.

Sun's current evalutaion of this bug is:

Seems a little premature to be looking at closing it soon - posted today, closed tomorrow, eh ... ?

 

Until recently I've been using the legacy v5.0 JRE strand, because it works reliably, and I had experienced this most obscure of bugs many times when I tried to use the v6.0 JRE, but couldn't get any traction on the problem, since it was so uninformative and so the easiest option was to revert back to v5.0.

But recently to use a certain java app I had to have v6.0 JRE installed, and so revisited v6.0 and re-encountered the problem.

Luckily this time I got traction.

Hopefully, Java Engineering take the bug seriously.

Who knows how many of the v6.0 JRE domestic end-user community have suffered, or are suffering.

At least, anyway, there is a lot more pages out there, citing the problem, and connecting the dots, indexed in the search engines, for others to find.

 

One last link -

A very interesting technical account, which is right on topic for this bug:

Serious Java bug triggered by X-Setup tweak
http://www.x-setup.net/forum/showthread.php?p=6856

It also provides a tool for triggering the problem on demand.

Over to Java Engineering.