Cache or start/stop problem

Question

Here is my story...it's sad but true....about an applet, i once drew:
I go to my webpage...run my applet. Everything nice and neat. I decide to browse the internet (surf the web) but get bored. I come back to my applet and poof! Whole thing has gone to crap. Let me explain:
I have a tool bar with buttons (zoom in, zoom out, selection, the usual stuff). I use this tool to zoom in, out, etc on a big image...kinda like a map. Unfortunately, after revisiting my web-page the buttons seem to make my image disappear and only 1/2 of them work. But everything will be fine again if I restart the browser.
Now it takes a good 45 sec - 1 minute for this applet to load (its pretty extensive), but only 15 sec to load when I "revisit" it. This leads me to believe it may be a cache problem. But I could not have stopped/started it correctly and it is still running in the background as I browse the web.
Please Help!!!...please :)

Answer 1

I'm thinking the problem is with the stop & destroy command. From what I know, these are called by the browser. Is there any special code to be put in them.
I have this in the stop:
public void stop()
System.gc();
System.out.println("DApplet: stoped");
public void destroy(){}
I threw in garbage collection in stop and left destroy alone. I thought these where automatically called by the browser and nothing had to be added to them...but I could (am most likely am) be wrong. Maybe this is why it won't work, it is not completely destroyed?
Please help!