Well, I posted this identical problem on a SUN forum but no reply yet. Here it is:
I have J2SDK; it's installed and I'm using it every day to write beginner
Java applications. BUT I can't run
applets in my browser (I'm using Windows XP with IE 5) or even from the DOS prompt with the "appletviewer" command. When I type: appletviewer appletname.html
I get the message: 'appletviewer' is not recognised as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
So I followed the link to GET IT NOW on
www.java.com/en/index.jsp and it did the "Checking configuration" thing for an automatic download and left me with the Exception: Applet com.sun.java.Main notinited
Great, so they want my system to use an applet to install the software required to run applets(!?@#*?) So I tried the manual download and see that it's just JRE, which I have a recent copy of anyway. I know it works because I use it applications; it just won't work for applets. And since I've re-downloaded and reinstalled it a couple of times there's definitely not something wrong with the download file.
I am getting very irritated since I've been trying to sort this out for several weeks now. To add to this, it's not just my home pc that has this problem, but my one at work too (Windows 2000)!