Rebooting didn't work. Pointing Starsector at the system version of Java did. For the record, it fails to start with the included JRE even when the starting RAM use was 1.4 GB out of 8GB. This was a clean install of everything on brand-new hardware/OS.
As I mentioned, it's really more like 1.4 GB out of 3 or 4, not 8. I'm really surprised, though. How can a clean install of windows 8.1 foul up 4 gigs of memory? A rhetorical question, I suppose, since apparently it can.
I have a request- can future versions of Starsector not include a JRE? The included JRE seems to cause major issues on nearly every Linux install, and now medium to high-end Windows machines as well (the fix is always pointing starsector.bat/starsector.sh at the system's default version of Java).
I don't think that'd be a good idea. It works out of the box in something like 99% of the cases, if not better. Whatever the actual install rate of Java is, it's going to be a lot lower than that, so it'd be a support nightmare not to include it.
If anything, I suspect I'll eventually need to also ship it with a 64-bit version, but holding off on that just due to the considerable hassle it'd be release-wise to provide both versions.