Thanks for all the help everyone
PhatSharpie, I do use Fire quite quite often -- those apps were mainly for my wife, who is still running OS9 on her iBook. This whole thread was started when I was showing her OSX on my iBook and why she should switch. When she found out that none of her Java applet-sites would run right, she said she had no reason to switch, and so started my quest to find out wtf is going on
At any rate, Java is now working in Mozilla, but I still can't get any Java apps to run whatsoever in IE -- tho I haven't downloaded 5.2 yet.
Thanks again