> That fixed it!
>
> Cheers. I've spend over a day puzzling over this and would never have
> found it. I've used exclamation marks in paths for the last 9 years with no
> trouble, I guess I'll have to change my ways!

Or upgrade to Java 6 ;)
I only realised the problem because I had a similar problem at my previous job where a salesperson created a big panic over a just released beta-version of our application. After some trying it turned out his filepath contained a character our launcher (or maybe the application itself) tripped over (could have been an exclamation mark, could have been something else).
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