CreateThread failure since R 2.15.2 (32-bit)

Dear R users & developers,

I coming across the following issue since R 2.15.2 32-bit (running on
Windows XP 32.bit; some output left out for conciseness):

setInternet2(TRUE)
require(rJava)
.jinit()
getCRANmirrors()
system("ls" , intern = TRUE)

Error in system("ls", intern = TRUE) : CreateThread failed

My details are as follows:

sessionInfo()

R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Switzerland.1252
LC_CTYPE=German_Switzerland.1252
LC_MONETARY=German_Switzerland.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                        LC_TIME=German_Switzerland.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] rJava_0.9-3


The failure appears since R 2.15.2, i.e. also with R 2.15.2patched and
with R-Devel. It does, however, not appear with e.g. R 2.15.1 or R
2.14.2. Also, I don't get the issue with R 2.15.2 64-bit (running on
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit).

Also note that the issue seems related to rJava in that running the
same without the rJava part (and therefore without initializing a JVM
instance) runs fine:

setInternet2(TRUE)
getCRANmirrors()
system("ls" , intern = TRUE)

Any ideas on what the issue might be?

Thanks & Best regards,
Martin