do you think there is a possibility that the Java on the site that you are basing your assumptions on, could be faulty?
I'm using osx 10.5.8 on an imac and recently whenever my wife tries to access this education site, it crashes firefox. I was going to reinstall firefox, but I tried logging in using Safari 5.0.6 and it gave me an alert. It said that I needed to open my preferences and enable java. When I did that Java was enabled. So, I'm wondering if there is a bad preference that I need to throw away.

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