ok just tried a service install using 0.2.9a.tar.gz (the one on the website). It work both for a 1.6_u25 Sun JDK. I tested both the 32bit and 64bit versions ok. I haven't tried openJDK1.7 but I can't see any reason why it would fail. Unless "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll" doesn't happen to exist in openJDK?
You might try editing win-service.bat and changing the options : --StartMode=jvm and --StopMode=jvm to either 'java' or 'exe' (no quotes).
Detail doc on service options available here:
http://commons.apache.org/daemon/procrun.htmlprocrun can be a bitch to get right so I'm scared to touch it once I've found a working config.
I got it running and it seems much more stable than the last version, just need to do some performance tuning. I fixed it by finally getting the gui to run and then selecting 'use default' instead of C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll even though this file did exist, something was not working with it, no idea why. I think the default might be using my 32bit jre instead of the 64bit jdk that I installed just for this, but after reading your tips that 32bit java was better in this instance.... I'll just let it go since it's running now.