I\'ve just inherited a java application that needs to be installed as a service on XP and vista. It\'s been about 8 years since I\'ve used windows in any form and I\'ve neve
I always just use sc.exe (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251192). It should be installed on XP from SP1, and if it's not in your flavor of Vista, you can download load it with the Vista resource kit.
I haven't done anything too complicated with Java, but using either a fully qualified command line argument (x:\java.exe ....) or creating a script with Ant to include depencies and set parameters works fine for me.