If I try and open a java applet (e.g. the Sun test your Java VM applet) then it will be very slow, and the moving graphics will flicker. This makes a game like slime volleyball much harder to play. This also happens if I use appletviewer.

I get this on my laptop and my desktop. Some info:
Laptop:
700MHz, trident video card (no hardware rendering), Gentoo with blackdown jre and jdk, optimised from source.

Desktop:
3.2GHz, nVidia video card (hardware rendering), Gentoo with sun jre and jdk, binaries (everything else is optimised from source).

Thanks.

Have you got the official or blackdown version of Java? You might try them both to see if it does any difference ..

you should try the official sun jre and jvm, you can find them here:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp

I'm using the official version - I don't like the blackdown version because it makes buttons in things like limewire too large.