Ill see what I can do...  Im new at deploying a product to a very large
audience, usually its just a couple of people in an office, or simply
servlets of one kind or another...  So I am learning/hacking my way
through it and feel like a newb in this department, thus the many
questions.  Plus Im desperate to finish it up this week.

Im pretty sure that both questions will be answered here:
The application saves files to the users pc, and also creates many
files (potentially 10's of thousands of files or more, then reallocates
almost all of them), it also sends data over the web.
However I have left the idea of using JWS behind because I believe a
number of things seem to be a big pain;
including obtaining a security certificate yearly (and even though
cacert.org allows you to do this for free, free items like this rarely
last long, so it means $$$ in the future).  Plus its one more step to
delivering/testing my app.
Also It delivers the app as a pure .jar files.  I suspect that
some-many users will see the extension and wonder why their double
clicking a .jar file... not usually associated with desktop apps.  Even
as a developer, if I see a .jar file for me to double click, Ill wonder
who made the application.  Why is it that they cannot produce an exe.
Perhaps I wont even run the program first, but instead open it in my
zip program... and may think what idiot installed a jar file on my
desktop - but hey, that's me.

I liked the idea that Java web start can do auto-updates.  Something I
thought might prove difficult to implement on my own...  If I had just
tried to do it, then I wouldn't have looked into JWS so deeply, because
i simply (and recently) figured out how I could check for a new jar
file online and replace the one in my "jar" folder,  JWS also provided
an icon,  (Im new to deployment remember), and I thought, hey, great,
one less thing to worry about, icon and updates built in!

On the other end, creating an exe for windows has proven easy, also
allowing the jar files to still exist on the users machine instead of
wrapping them - good for updates, bad for security.  The other bad? -
creating a mac app like that does not seem like it will be easy.  But
creating a mac app of the bundled kind is easy. (too bad I dont have a
mac to play with), Unix - my app wont run on (it uses quicktime for
java).

Also avoiding JWS allows me to use a typical installer, which also
allows me to assign file extensions to my application (for windows at
least, I dont know about mac yet...)

Also JNLP - my web host support my own .htaccess file, but I dont trust
them to be dependable, and it may vanish, or stop working because they
fooled with some setting.  So a little nervous with that too.

I abandoned JWS because there were just too many gotchas, one or two I
could live with, but it was just too much.  Plus there are a lot of
references online that badmouth it (at least the older versions).

thanks for letting me vent... I guess.  and your help, I did notice
your name come up a few times.