Are there any free utilities I can call from either the command line
or through Visual Basic or java to convert a bitmap to lossless jpg
and back to a bitmap.  I would prefer one that can handle a group of
bitmaps differing in name only by the last numbers, and if possible,
the ability to adjust the compression vs quality.

Hi welday007,
The only Free Utility I am aware of that works like a charm for
converting Image Files is ImageMagick.
Software available at: 
http://imagemagick.org/www/archives.html

The ImageMagick Command line program 'convert' has parameters for 
setting the Quality and Compression Value:
  -compress type       image compression type
  -quality value       JPEG/MIFF/PNG compression level
convert supports wildcards but the new filenames are appended with a
number such as:
old.jpg.0 
old.jpg.1


If you have anymore questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you.

-googleexpert

This is exactly what I wanted, and the advertisement link to
WinSoftMagic gives me the graphical GUI I was hoping for to determine
the best compression to use.