serial maintenance terminal for rack-mounted appliance?

Hello,

We're trying to build a rack-mounted appliance that supports use of a
serial maintenance terminal (e.g., VT100) to interact with a simple
text-based menu on COM1 of the appliance. Have others done something
similar with XP Embedded, and if so how?

I posted a related question a few days ago and have been surprised that
there's been no response so far. How DO others perform maintenance and
support operations on their rack-mounted XP Embedded appliances? Surely
one cannot always require a network or GUI connection to the appliance.

We're from a UNIX background, where we could easily configure a 'getty'
process to use our text-based menu interface as a shell for all "logins"
on a designated port, where the menu interface simply reads from the
standard input and output streams that 'getty' has assigned to correspond
to the port. Does XP Embedded offer anything similar to this?

FWIW, our text menu interface is written in SUN's Java. I'm considering
using serial support from the javax.comm package to access COM1 but would
then still need to wrap it with a Windows Service to start the Java app
at boot time.

Thanks in advance,
Dan S.