While investigating 6482575 (Leak in ImageIcon), I discovered that the plugin always loads ImageIcon This makes it more difficult to find and test a fix for 6482575.

sun.plugin.AppletViewer loads ImageIcon explicitly as a workaround for 6482575, but besides that, ImageIcon is also loaded from here:

Exception in thread "Thread-2" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/swing/ImageIcon
    at sun.swing.SwingUtilities2$2.createValue(SwingUtilities2.java:1473)
    at javax.swing.UIDefaults.getFromHashtable(UIDefaults.java:217)
    at javax.swing.UIDefaults.get(UIDefaults.java:162)
    at com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel.initComponentDefaults(WindowsLookAndFeel.java:646)
    at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicLookAndFeel.getDefaults(BasicLookAndFeel.java:148)
    at javax.swing.UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.java:546)
    at javax.swing.UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.java:590)
-> at com.sun.deploy.util.DeployUIManager.setLookAndFeel(DeployUIManager.java:104)
-> at sun.plugin.util.PluginSysUtil$1.run(PluginSysUtil.java:70)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:644

The trace was from running an AWT-only applet (the DrawTest demo applet) with the console, logging, tracing, and the tray icon all disabled, so I would not expect Swing to be required to be loaded, but it appears that plugin is setting its LookAndFeel anyway. This loads ~60 classes that shouldn't need to be loaded.