Here's a brief description of the bug for those interested in Java development. We haven't been able to relate it to other known problems of Microsoft's Java.

The bug is a ghost exception: The applet aborts with an exception but if you add any print statements to find the exact place of the failure or add code to trap the exception, the anomalous behavior dissappears, the exception vanishes like it was never there!. More details follow...

The original version of our applet worked fine with netscape navigator/communicator and jdk appletviewers.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer starts the applet but fails with ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException on exit of our method `gp_program'.

Adding any System.out.println anywhere inside the `erroneous' method makes the problem dissappear!!.

Also, encapsulating all the method's code within 

try {
    ...
    }
catch (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
   // Print error message and abort the program
   }

fixes the problem again!. The exception never happens.

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