I am currently evaluating the Java 7 update 71 32-bit JRE in our environment. Right now, I'm testing with Windows 8.1 64-bit. It seems to work fine in our environment in Firefox (ESR and regular) but in Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) 32-bit I get one or two UAC prompts each time I open IE11 or open a new tab in the browser. Sometimes it also happens if I click on a link.
The "Program location" line in the UAC prompt says the following:
"C:PROGRA~2\Java\jre7\bin\ssvagent.exe" -old -high
If I press Yes on the UAC prompt, Java breaks in IE11. It will only work if I run IE11 as administrator or if I take steps to fix it, such as running "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7\bin\ssvagent.exe" -high -jpisetup -new manually.
If I press No on the UAC prompt, Java continues to work in IE11 but will keep popping up the UAC dialog very often.
If I manually disable both the Java(tm) Plug-In SSV Helper and Java(tm) Plug-In 2 SSV Helper add-ons in IE11, the UAC prompt no longer appears. This is satisfactory, but as it is not the default setting it is clearly not the optimal solution.
I've seen various links on the Internet describe this issue with older versions of Java 7 such as update 1, update 4, and update 51 but was unable to find a true solutions. I found some filed bugs but they were all listed as closed, fixed in subsequent versions. I also found reference to this problem occurring due to ssvagent.exe not finding the correct/expected registry settings and attempting to repair them, but due to a programming bug it is prompting to run ssvagent.exe elevated and the changes it makes actually break Java for the user. In my searching, I have not been able to find the registry settings it is looking for.
Does anyone have a solution to this problem, or is there a way we can file a bug? We do not have any kind of paid support for the Java JRE.