I worked at a company that was delivering a client-side app in Java launched from IE. I think we had an ActiveX plugin as the "launcher." This predated "Java Web Start." It was hysterically bad. We were targeting 32 meg Win 98 systems and they were comically slow and unstable. Most of our developers had 64 and 128 meg boxes with NT 4.0. I mostly worked on the server side stuff, and used them as a terminal into the Solaris and Linux systems.