Getting Java to talk to the serial port in win32:
David Merrill <dmerrill@media.mit.edu>
(this worked as of Summer 2003)
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1. Windows: place the win32com.dll in <jdk>\jre\bin directory.
Solaris: put the libSolarisSerialParallel.so in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

2. Place the comm.jar in <jdk>\jre\lib\ext.

3. Place the javax.comm.properties in <jdk>\jre\lib .

4. Do not alter the CLASSPATH.

5. invoke java with the full path, so that the system's java executable 
doesn't execute instead of the SUN java.exe that you've got
C:\j2sdk1.4.2\bin\java UnifiedInterface