JVM unstable with XP?

Question

Please help!
I'm using the JRE SE 1.4.1_01 with the plug-in under IE 6 on WinXP. I've done a little AWT development, but I've just started using Swing with the Sun JRE. Roughly 1 of every 5 times I close my browser while a Swing applet is running, the JVM appears to lock up. The symptom is that CPU utilization jumps to 100% and I can't usually even bring up task manager to try to kill the VM, so I end up rebooting. I'm sure it's Java related because 1) it always happens when I exit an IE that's running a Swing applet and 2) my PC is only 3 months old or so and is very stable otherwise (I can do other development all day without any trouble).
Any ideas? I'd like to be able to recommend Java for a new development effort, but if the VM is as flaky as it appears to be, I just can't :-(
Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

Roughly 1 of every 5 times I close my browser while a
Swing applet is running, the JVM appears to lock up.
The symptom is that CPU utilization jumps to 100%
% and I can't usually even bring up task manager to
try to kill the VM, so I end up rebooting. I'm sure
it's Java related because 1) it always happens when I
exit an IE that's running a Swing applet and 2) my PC
is only 3 months old or so and is very stable
otherwise (I can do other development all day without
any trouble).Although a total Java novice newbie, I've seen this behavior before - and it was self-inflicted. I was fooling around with some timing loops in an applet and, while it displayed okay in the browser, the CPU usage went through the roof and I had to use TaskManager to kill the browser.
This was using the 1.4.1_01 JDK/JRE - if I switched to MSJVM or used a different machine with the 1.3 JRE, there was not problem. I can't say specifically what I changed to fix it, but rewriting the timing function was the solution to making the applet work for all the JVMs.
I know this is merely anecdotal, but I hope it helps steer you in the right direction.