On Windows 7, when running standalone.bat with the JAVA_HOME environment variable set (but pointing to an empty directory), JBoss EAP fails to start and does not give an error message.
On line 177 of the standalone.bat, a check is made to see if the JAVA_HOME variable points to a valid directory. If it does, it assumes this directory contains bin\java. If bin\java does not exist, the server fails to start and does not give a reason why.
expect to see an error message such as "%JAVA_HOME% path doesn't contain an executable at %JAVA_HOME%\bin\java"

Add additional checks in the standalone.conf to verify that %JAVA_HOME%\bin\java exists and warn if it does not.