I've just added another windows slave (happens to be on VBox). There is no ant on the slave system and hudson is configured to install ant 1.6.5 automatically from Apache. However, when I try to execute a job on the newly added slave I get this error:

+ java -version

java version "1.6.0_17"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b02)

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode)

+ ant -version

ant: C:\DOCUME~1\j2eetest\LOCALS~1\Temp\hudson1198511668486842161.sh 19: not found

Archiving artifacts

Recording test results

Sending e-mails to: lidia@sun.com

Finished: FAILURE

I'm not sure these two are related but Hudson was also failing to install jdk on this system, I've manually installed JDK on this slave and configured system PATH, to get this far. Error from launching the slave when JDK was not present:

hudson.util.IOException2: Could not find any known supported java version in
[java, /usr/bin/java, /usr/java/default/bin/java, /usr/java/latest/bin/java,
/usr/local/bin/java, /usr/local/java/bin/java, C:\hudson/jdk/bin/java], and
we also failed to install JDK as a fallback

at hudson.plugins.sshslaves.SSHLauncher.launch(SSHLauncher.java:186)

at hudson.slaves.SlaveComputer$1.call(SlaveComputer.java:179)

at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303)

at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138)

at
java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)

at
java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)

at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to detect the environment for
automatic JDK installation. Please report this to users@hudson.dev.java.net:
Windows_NT WINXPIE8 5 01 586

Fix provided by Jerome Lacoste did not fix the issue.