Runtime.exec not showing GUI in JBoss environment

Question

There are many Q & A on Runtime.exec, but still I found a strange behavior. I am running desktop application in which jobs (a kind of javax.resource.spi.work.Work) are submitted and executed in JBoss application server. Following is the code to run some script, which is blocking whenever it needs to launch any GUI. For example, if the script or command is

start notepad

The GUI is not launched, but i can see the notepad.exe in Task Manager. I dont know what is blocking to launch the notepad GUI. Following is the code:

String pathString= "D:\\folder\\abcd.bat";
pro = runtime.exec(new String[] {
          pathString
        });

Content of abcd.bat file is

start notepad

No error logs or exception found. The above code works very well in normal Java class.

EDIT: Issue found only with .exe files which launch GUI. Some .exe which does not require launching GUI but running some background task is executed very well with my code.

EDIT: Forgot to say that my application is running as service.

Answer 1

Starting from Windows vista, services not allowed interacting with desktop. More details here . It is windows security restriction to not allow services to interact with desktop. I have done changes in regedit and Log On properties of my service, it worked well.