Flash: “Error initializing Java Runtime Environment - You may need to reinstall Flash.” July 29, 2008

I've been trying to create a swf with about 100MB of uncompressed jpegs in it.  Not surprisingly Flash opening it up expands to a whopping 1.5GB of ram, and then complains it ran out of memory during publishing it (even though the machine has 3GB of ram..), just prior to that it gives that error.

http://blog.tukker.org/2008/05/23/flash-cs3-error-initalizing-java-runtime-environment/

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=612&threadid=1184131&messageid=4278084

This didn't make sense initially. But then I realized that adobe is likely using Java in the background to do the compilations, perhaps even embedding the FCSH.,  which  would allow them to write the very difficult compiler in a cross platform way.

This might also explain why Flash (and Flex/Eclipse) hang for periods of time, as this is typical of garbage collection, and the larger the memory the longer it takes to do the sweep.