Apparently not. Sun's view is they don't want half baked JREs floating
around screwing up other applications.  They won't even let the Jet
people distribute a natively compiled JRE.

I can see five ways around the problem:

1. flooding the Universe with CDs containing the JRE.

2. Getting MS and other OS makers to bundle the JRE and keep it up to
date automatically with auto updates.

3. invent an efficient way to update the JRE without having to send
every byte all over. what you really want to send is the delta of the
obfuscated source, or something logically equivalent.
This of the program as a parse tree. Send the changes to the tree, not
the changes to the class files considered as a text file.
see http://mindprod.com/projects/deltacreator.html
http://mindprod.com/projects/bulkfiledistributor.html

4. Sun get aggressive about keeping its JREs up to date. They
automatically update themselves in the dead of night unless
bludgeoned.

5. A standard installer that sniffs around for a JRE. If it can't find
one it downloads one from Sun and installs it.  This way you need not
bundle a JRE with your program, unless you are distributing on CD.
It is nuts for every app to independently solve this general problem
or try to get novice users to handle it manually.  The last time I
looked, even the professional installer InstallAnywhere was not bright
enough to do that. You had to decide to either include or exclude the
JRE. If you included it, it got installed even if there was a more
recent one already installed.

The file jre/README contains a list of the files which Sun requires in a
re-distribution, and also a (small) list of files which you are allowed
to omit.

/Thomas