Sentinel 5.1.3 will not start after upgrade from 5.1.1

After an upgrade from Sentinel 5.1.1 to Sentinel 5.1.3 the Communications service (Sonic) will not start. A log file is not written out with any kind of information for Communications though other services show timeouts waiting to communicate to the Communications service on its port (10012 by default).

An old security patch in Microsoft Windows prevented the Java Runtime Environment from allocating a sufficiently-large amount of memory for its heap. As a result none of the classes used for the Communications service could be loaded to even write out messages to the log files. Patching the Microsoft Windows server resolved the issue. Links to relevant external documents from Sun and Microsoft are below.

Considering the nature of this patch the failure of any Java-based processes could be caused by this Microsoft bug.

The patch the breaks Java is Microsoft patch #921883 (MS06-040).

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=37&threadID=759413

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924054