In reply to:

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Am I the only person that finds that the Sun plugin works about a hundred times better than the standard IE one?

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Not at all - the JView VM that comes with IE is horribly buggy in many respects (don't ask me about modal dialogs, for instance). The cynical part of me is easily convinced that it's a deliberate ploy by MS to discredit Java, though they claim they are restricted by the current legal case to providing a broken, out-of-date implemention.