hi Tim
Many thanks for the reply.
I've tidied up my whole configuration, set everything running under Java version 1.6.0_21, and so see a consistent error, which I now realise is the known problem you mentioned in an earlier post
https://glassfish.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11339
When I build a project and deploy the ear or jar from the console, or use autodeploy, web start works fine but if the application is deployed from NetBeans it fails with an error 'Found unsigned entry in resource'.
I'm happy to live with having to deploy outside NetBeans, I'm just glad to find out how to make web start work reliably!
Many thanks again to everyone.
-- Richard
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