Lost with granting signed applet permissions

Question

Hi all,
My apologies for the cross post, I have incorrectly sent this post to the jre forum but I think it is more specific to the signed aplpet forum..
We need to deploy a very simple applet which sole role is to connect to a domain other than mother to send and get some data. We have a certificate from Verisign and have signed the applet. So far so good. The applet is compiled and signed with the jdk 1.3.1_12. With the JRE 1.3.1_x, it works just fine. If the jre 1.4.2_x is installed however, the connection doesn't happen and we receive a permission denied exception instead:
java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.net.SocketPermission xxxxx resolve)
With jre 1.4.2, when the applet loads, we do see the security prompt, but we get the permission denied exception even if we specifically choose to trust the applet. I thought this step would automatically grant all priviledges?
So I don't know what to do from here. How can the applet request for the correct permission in jre 1.4.2_x? I looked around and found some information about policy files but I'm at a loss at how to use that, we have no control as to who will see the applet so I don't think we can ask all to update their policy file first.
What we want to have is for our users to grant priviledge at the security prompt and not worry about anything else, even with jre1.4. Can it be done?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Tim.

Answer 1

If the above information doesn't help you a full trace might come in handy:
To turn the full trace on (windows) you can start the java console, to be found here:
C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4...\bin\jpicpl32.exe
In the advanced tab you can fill in something for runtime parameters fill in this:
-Djavaplugin.trace=true -Djavaplugin.trace.option=basic|net|security|ext|liveconnect
if you cannot start the java console check here:
C:\Documents and Settings\userName\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\deployment.properties
add or change the following line:
javaplugin.jre.params=-Djavaplugin.trace\=true -Djavaplugin.trace.option\=basic|net|security|ext|liveconnect
The trace is here:
C:\Documents and Settings\your user\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\log\plugin...log