We are running Tomcat 5 in a windows service using the bundled Tomcat5.exe. This was fine under Java 5.0, but failed following an upgrade to Java 6.0. The problem only manifested itself on certain PCs.

It turns out that there is a file that Java requires to be on the path. On some PCs (where this file is in the path) everything was fine. On others without the file on the path it failed.

The problem was solved by copying msvcr71.dll from the Java 6.0 bin directory to Tomcat's bin directory, beside Tomcat5.exe. We also had to copy it to windows/system32 for some machines.