In the period before an applet starts loading, the current (both old and new) Java Plug-Ins do not paint the region associated with the applet, which tends to cause it to show up white at least on Windows. If the HTML developer has selected a different background color for the web page, this means that there will be a white flicker in the applet's area that the applet developer has no control over and which looks extremely unprofessional especially compared to the competition. We need to do something about this. The initial thinking is to pay attention to the boxbgcolor if specified, and if not, to use the browser's scripting engine to figure out the page's background color, and to use the native OS's drawing primitives to paint the applet's region before the client JVM starts executing the applet content.
See the following forum thread for another possible test case for this issue:

http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=38310&tstart=0

post by "davester", with test case hosted at http://cardmeeting.com/ ... .