any applet has a reasonable chance of deadlocking on startup... but
the applet shown below repros the problem quite often with appletviewer_g:

import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.*;

class Foo extends Canvas
{
    public void paint(Graphics g)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < 255; i += 2)
        {
            g.setColor(new Color(i, 0, 0));
            g.drawString("this is a test of foo", i, i);
        }
    }

    public Dimension getPreferredSize()
    {
        return new Dimension(100, 100);
    }

    public Dimension getMinimumSize()
    {
        return getPreferredSize();
    }
}

public class test extends Applet
{
    public void init()
    {
        setLayout(new FlowLayout());
        add(new Foo());
        add(new Foo());
        add(new Foo());
    }
}