This pretty much has me defeated.
On XP and earlier versions of Windows you could customise Open With filetypes to include java - jar "myjar.jar", but on Vista this functionality seems to have been removed. I can of course create a .bat file to launch my application, but is it possible to make Vista execute a .jar as required?
Use the software JarFix >= 1.1.0 . There is Vista support included and it "recovers" the .jar association!
download for example here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Jarfix.shtml
You can do it from the command line with 2 utilities.
The first one, ASSOC, is used to create a file association. To verify if there is one defined for JAR type :
>assoc .jar
.jar=jarfile
If not found then create it with :
>assoc .jar=jarfile
The next step is to define the association. This is done with FTYPE.
To verify if one is already defined , type
>ftype jarfile
jarfile="C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_10\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %*
Again if not found or the wrong JRE is used, use FTYPE to fix the problem
>ftype jarfile="C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_10\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %*