The Apache Tomcat instructions on this are here but they are both worse than useless and totally acurate. It starts we the sentence:

This section of the documentation applies to procrun 1.0, and is now obsolete

Great! Now what. There is no link to the document that supersedes it, nor what procrun is! Typical open source documentation! As with all these thinks you have to go reading old mail archives to find the answer. Buried about half way down an archive page on a generalist open source support web site is the answer. procrun is a thin (’C') executable program that can run java classes. An extension of procrun is prunsrv which also knows how to register services with windows. Now, here is the gem of information that lets everything make sense. The vital piece of information that would save everyone who reads the Apache Tomcat Windows documentation 2 hours of searching for…. wait for it….. Tomcat has compiled up prunsrv.exe with the instructions for starting and stopping Tomcat and renamed it to tomcat6.exe. If you find your tomcat6.exe executable, right click it and select Properties. Go to the Version tab and select Original File name is says “prunsrv.exe". The original Tomcat documentation is actually correct, the documentation page is obsolete because you should be reading the prunsrv.exe documentation. But good luck finding that - only kidding it’s here!.