I understand the problem, which seems to affect only windows. We have a solution for everyone in a command line script that can be downloaded (or soon, solution verified this morning).
The problem on windows is that the hdf5 dlls need to be in the path before launching HDFView. This is because we dynamically load hdf5 dlls from the hdf5_java.dll file, this is so that HDFView can use the compression plugins feature of HDF5.
The reason it is an “exe” is because that was the default on windows. We also have two versions depending on your needs, an installer that adds a menu shortcut and file associations. The installer also installs into the user account by default. The other is called an App Image which is just the directory structure that the installer produces.
The HDFView.exe at the install location is basically an application of the command script. One nice feature is the HDFView.cfg file in the app folder. This is all the java command line options in an editable file. Some may fine that useful.
The downloadable scripts bypass that executable and cfg file by setting the path and executing the HDFView class directly.
We hope to improve the next release and address some of these concerns. But we are also relying on other software that needs some improvements.
Allen