Java applets stopped working after a year of working fine

lots of user complaints but I made no change!

[muesli]

i have a site with a java applet that has used to work fine for more than a year. suddenly the applet stops working fine on most of our machines and many user complaints keep coming in, although no change was done on the applet.

the applet does load but some functions/buttons just don't anymore, especially after reloading the applet once. no error messages.

i hear the same from other sites using this applet. was there any sort of "auto-update" of all IEs' virtual machines?

on my particular PC i have JVM 1.4.0_01-ea-b02 running, both for IE6.0 and netscape 7b01. a coffee-cup icon appears in the system tray when i first load a page with an applet (which takes very long, ~40 seconds). i re-installed my system around the time when the problem appeared so i can't say if it ever has worked fine with this environment.

i'm not familiar with java applets and their specifics - any ideas?

ps. used site search and couldn't find anything.

[tedster]

Service Pack 1 for WindowsXP did indeed make changes related to Microsoft's VM and away from Sun's JVM. This may well be what you are suffering - it's certainly worth checking into, especially if some people can run the applet and others can't.

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm running Windows XP and visited a Web site with a Java applet and Internet Explorer told me I couldn't run it; what is going on?

see: Microsoft Web Documentation [microsoft.com]