Why does my applet throw a ClassCastException from the AWT Dispatch Event thread?
The number of containers between the applet and the encompassing frame are different in the Microsoft and Sun implementations. Therefore, an applet that relies on the frame being at some particular level of containment in the Microsoft VM, without navigating the entire AWT hierarchical component tree, is likely to fail when run on Sun’s JRE/Java Plug-in. The most common symptom of this problem is a ClassCastException from the AWT Dispatch Event thread.