In IE - and should be the same for IE6 or IE7 - at Tools on the top menu, there's a "Manage Add-ons" button. When you click on it, it offers "enable/disable" or "search for."

If you click the enable/disable it should show you a list of all the "ActiveX" add-ons. You can take a look there for anything "strange" that might have gotten to you, and can enable/disable individual ones.

Note that there's a drop down roller at the top of the window that gives you four different lists of stuff to check.

Most of the stuff there will be "applets" that come with one or another of your programs, but a quick look gives some assurance that you haven't picked up something phony.

The real point of entry for java is in IE Tools|Internet Options, on the Security tab. Click the "Custom Settings" button, and scroll down to where you see "java" something. It's probably about half way down.

My setting is at "high security" but one of the options is "disable java" and if it's clicked it would prevent mudchat from doing much of anything, since the program appears to be mostly jscript.

Lots of people recommend turning off jscript except when you really need it but I haven't found any problems with letting IE use the default "secure" setting. With all the latest bells and whistles, a site that wants to use java should trigger a popup in IE that asks if you want to turn it on - temporarily, for the current site only, or full on (but that may also be a WinXP Firewall function that I'm seeing).

John