title: Java Applet failing to load, but browser shows <applet> tags
body: <p>I'm having a problem on a system I'm working on, where the users report that intermittently a Java applet silently fails to load. Note that most of the time it works, but fairly regularly someone will report this silent failure.</p>
  
  <p>On investigation, I've found that:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The <code>&lt;applet&gt;</code> tags are there in the browser, with all the required information.</li>
  <li>The browser won't let me right-click on the area it's allocated for the applet: nothing happens at all.</li>
  <li>I don't see the Java animation that you normally get when it's loading the JVM. No java console pops up either!</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This has got me stumped - anyone got any bright ideas? What would cause the browser (Firefox in this case) to not instantiate the JVM? How can I debug this more efficiently?</p>