Tomcat - Error starting.

I recently have been installing Tomcat 6 on a new server.

After installing a fresh JRE and then apache-tomcat-6.0.18.exe I got the error:

Windows could not start the Apache Tomcat on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 0.

To fix this I copied the file msvcr71.dll from my Java/bin directory into the Apache-Tomcat/bin directory.

It worked... though why it didn't work "out of the box" without such "black magic" I really don't know!!!!. I spent ages trying a range of different Tomcat installations, JAVA versions and classpath settings.

Aaaargh! Those were precious hours of my life I'm never going to get back...