title: JRE 6 and 7 side-by-side with JRE 6 as default (Win 7)
body: <p>For a migration project to migrate from Java 6 to Java 7 runtime on Windows 7, we are looking to get the following situation:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Both JRE 6 and JRE 7 are installed on the machine</li>
  <li>JRE 6 is set as the default</li>
  <li>JRE 7 will be explicitly requested by applets and webstart applications that require it.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>We found lots of solutions that use the path to achieve a situation like this, but we are looking for a way to keep the default path (using the java.exe in C:\Windows\System). Changing the registry key \HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\CurrentVersion to 1.6 does not work unfortunately.</p>
  
  <p>Does anybody have experience with a setup like this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong>
  I get a lot of questions WHY we want this. I can discuss all the ins and outs, but please take it from me that we discussed all possible scenario's and this is the one that impacts our business the least. There are more than 10K systems (laptop + desktop) involved and lots of different Applets, webstart applications and standalone client applications involved.</p>