I got the same problem after installing the latest jdk (24). For me it works fine do use an old jre which was still installed on the pc (1.8.0_441). And so i edited the batch file run.bat to use the old one. On my pc from javaw -Xmx512m -Xms32m -jar run.jar %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 to "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_441\bin\javaw" -Xmx512m -Xms32m -jar "C:\Program Files\GenealogyJ\run.jar" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9