Jay,
This is because windows does not associate the .jar file extension with any application. (In windows explorer click on the View... menu, then on Options... then go to the File Types tab to see currently recognized file types.) Also, as far as I know, .jar files are basically like .zip files (actually they *are* .zip files... open one in WinZip...
) they just package all your seperate classes, images, and data files together and compress them a bit. The only way to run a Java program w/o the JRE is to compile it to native code... and that way you wouldn't need a different JRE for each type of computer... you would just need a different native compiler for each type of computer.
Although if you just want to run your program on one type of computer this would probably be the way to go... I think there may be free native code compilers out there for Mac and Linux, but I don't know of any *free* ones for Windows... ( I know Symantec and Borland have their versions (and MS *may* for J++, I really don't know since I never used their bastardized version of Java), but all these are pretty expensive...) If anyone knows of any free native code compilers for Windows would you please post?
-Nate
