I believe the issue you are having is the path to the open office program folder is not in the path environmental variable. When OpenVPMS needs to start a background copy of Open Office it needs to know how to find the soffice executable. One way to test this is to open a command prompt on the machine being used as a server and type soffice and see what happens.

The suggested openvpms user resolves two issues specific to running open office in background.

1. If the Tomcat service is started as the standard Local Service account and then tries to start open office, OO will try and start as this user and initialise its profile settings in windows which includes the initial registration prompts etc. Essentially it will hang there till this happens (in the background) and you have no way of logging into this account to preconfigure open office so it doesn't.

2. If you start open office as a another user that will log into OpenVPMS they will not be able to utilise the Open Office applications through their login as it is running in the background and any attempt to open Writer etc will get no result (in the background it will open but user will not be able to see it).

Hence my suggestion to create a special user , pre-initialise open office when logged into this user and run Tomcat as this user. The user can be secured with a complex password as long as you use the same password on the Tomcat service and I don't believe it needs to belong to the Administrators group.

If you can provide a better solution that utilises a non login account I would be very happy to hear it.

Cheers Tony