I was trying to run Oracle SQL Developer for the first time on a new machine. When firing it up, it presented me with a dialog box asking me to “Enter the full pathname for the java.exe file”.
OK, no problem. So I find the path to the java.exe binary that was just installed with the SDK. Hit submit . . . and nothing happens. It blanks out the text field and the dialog box stares back at me.
I tried pointing it to the java.exe that was in the jre dir. No joy.
After a lot of futzing around and doing some searches it turns out that there are a few things that you have to do to get it to run for the first time.
First, right-click on the Oracle SQL Developer short-cut and select “Run as Administrator”.
Then, in the dialog box, click Browse and navigate to the JDK that comes with the Oracle install. For me it was in C:\Oracle11G\11.2.0.3\jdk\bin\java.exe
Once I did that it fired right up. I then quit, and ran it as my user and it seemed to start up just fine.