Weird behavior with main method
I originally thought that this was just the command line shell performing filename expansion. That's what I'd expect under a Unix-like system, but not Windows... but the same occurs for me under Windows, too.
It doesn't occur when I write the equivalent C# code... so I suspect it's something in the Java executable launcher doing it. (Note that javaw.exe behaves the same way as java.exe.)
It certainly came as a surprise to me, and I didn't think older versions of Java did this on Windows, although this mailing list post from December 2000 suggests I'm wrong. (I'm using an OpenJDK 1.7 JRE.)
I can't find any description of this general case in the Java Windows documentation - it mentions expansion of classpath entries, but not general arguments.
Not until recently (i guess in Java 6) a new feature was added to Java, where '*' is translated to all files in the current directory. This was mainly to avoid need for passing long class paths and giving a platform independent way to pass all jar files in a folder to a classpath.
java -cp "lib/*" <mainClass>lib/* would be tranlated to list of file separated by the classpath separator for that platform (i.e. : for unix like and ; for windows) passed to -cp property.
I think this might be the reason for the behavior that you see. I assumed that it was only for specifying classpaths but now I think I was wrong then.