Got a problem reported by customer saying that she was getting an error while running "java" executable on Windows Server 2003.
Error occured during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object
Initially I was thinking it was the first time the JDK was installed on the server therefore I suspected it had something to do with the classpath setting. But the error persisted even though the classpath is set correctly. After some time-consuming Q&A have been carried out between the customer and I. Finally found out that it was actually the second time she installed the JDK (newer version) and more importantly she didn't use the Windows "Add/Remove program" to uninstall the previous version of JDK, it ended up that the previous version wasn't removed as proper as expected.
In fact, according to the famous Win32 developer Raymond Chen at Microsoft, we should always use the "Add/Remove program" to remove application.