I also discovered that IE4 has problems on a machine running MSPROXY.  It reports an internal error when attempting to access any site.

I downloaded and installed the new Microsoft Java VM, version 3165.  It fixed a bug that occurred in version 3158 (and possibly other earlier versions) which caused the following program to hang instead of throwing an exception:

public class MSVM3158 {
    public static void main (String [] args) throws Exception
    {
        try {
            throw new Exception ("xxx");
        } finally {
        }
    }
}

I did manage to use the Java VM interface IJavaExecute to set up a class path for a DLL, using a wrapper.  There is an obstacle, though:  when the wrapper is registered as a COM DLL, it invokes the wrapped DLLs registration function which promptly registers the wrapped file instead of the wrapper.  Oh well.  The theory now is to write IDL for the IJavaExecute interface (which MS does not supply) and generate a Java wrapper for it so that it can be called from directly within the Java DLL.  That should do the trick.

• I came across a company whose product offers DCOM connectibility in Pure Java:  http://www.linar.com/jintegra/doc/.
• I experimented with the Java VM invocation interface, trying to find solutions to the various CLASSPATH problems that we face.  I had some success writing both EXE and DLL variants.  The DLL could act as a wrapper for a VJ6-generated COM DLL by forwarding the COM calls to the library.