The jenkins-slave.xml file is a great idea, but has some problems:

1. As of 1.467 the jenkins-slave.xml file is overwritten every update; issue #JENKINS-14559

2. The <execute> node never sets the path to the just installed JDK (e.g. it says javaw.exe instead of c:\jenkins\jdk\bin\javaw.exe). This is problematic on multiple levels since by default c:\windows\syswow64 is not in the PATH and any new version of Java installed outside Jenkins will override the syswow executables.

I'd like to propose that the jenkins-slave.exe stuff works like so:

• Add a checksum for the jenkins-slave.xml file (perhaps jenkins-slave.xml.md5)
• If the checksums do not match; do not override the jenkins-slave.xml file.
• If the checksums match; then overwrite the jenkins-slave.xml file.
• When auto-generating the jenkins-slave.xml file, set the <execute> node to '<path-to-slave-dir>\<jdk-path>\bin\javaw.exe'

This would fix a bunch of issues with getting windows slaves up-and-running. See the wiki (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Windows+slaves+fail+to+start+via+DCOM#WindowsslavesfailtostartviaDCOM-Windows64bitinstallationrelatedissues ) for more info about this.

Ciao!