Java EE 5 SDK is released which would mean that I can finally catch my breath and go into happy dance mode.

Of course, that's only one way of looking at it. In real life, this also means that thousands of people start their download/install cycle and all obscure corner case installer bugs whose fix was deferred will come back to haunt me.

So, here's the tip on one of those. If you are using Windows and you have set your TEMP and/or TMP environment variables to point to a top level drive directory (E:\ for instance), Java EE 5 SDK distribution self-extracting executable will not process it correctly and you'll get "The '(null)' temporary directory is not a writable directory." error message when you start the installation. To work around this, temporarily set your variables to point to some existing subdirectory on your chosen drive (E:\temp for instance) and restart the installation.