windows installer failing to set windows service correctly

.exe JIRA installed in a clean xp and than in 2003;
service is installed by doesn't start up if you try to do it manually you get a pop-up with error as per serviceStartupError.JPG

OS system logs:

The Atlassian JIRA Enterprise Edition 3.8.1 service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0x0)

and Tomcat logs:

[2007-05-24 14:20:19] [info] Starting service...
[2007-05-24 14:20:19] [924 prunsrv.c] [error] Failed creating java
[2007-05-24 14:20:19] [1179 prunsrv.c] [error] ServiceStart returned 1

if you try to start up JIRA from command you get:

C:\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9\bin>startup.bat
JAVA_HOME "" contains spaces. Please change to a location without spaces if this causes problems.
If you encounter issues starting up JIRA Standalone Edition, please see the Troubleshooting guide at http://confluence.atlassian.com/troubleshooting+Guide
Neither the JAVA_HOME nor the JRE_HOME environment variable is defined
At least one of these environment variable is needed to run this program

although you can still start JIRA as an application with startup_bundled_jre.bat

additionally you can't unregister the service as per doc with:
service.bat remove JIRA

correct command is :
service.bat remove JIRA240507133018