As noted in 4777096, javaw doesn't display the same information as java if the vm terminates with an uncaught exception.  The cause of this discrepency is that the JNI function ExceptionDescribe prints to stderr and in a "windows application" like javaw, printing to stderr is a no-op.  Therefore, to allow javaw and other Java launchers more control over exception reporting, there should be a version of ExceptionDescribe which returns its output as a string.