Thank you, I will do a Google search for JVM now. It appears as if (according to the Wilkipedia definition) that JVM may indeed be quite helpful in this particular case. As an added note I went ahead and downloaded and installed the beta version of IE8 the other day in hopes it would help improve my situation. It did not. The jury is still out on what I think about IE8. So far the downside is that it crashes my browser everytime I close a game window powered by Java.
I'll get JVM installed and see if that helps. If not I'll try uninstalling the IE8 upgrade and see if JVM + IE7 is the right formula. So far I've found that rebooting every 6 hours or so helps for a while. However, soon enough my CPU is once again pegged at 100% and using Process Explorer shows me that IE runs between 45% and 55% of my CPU as long as I have a game window open if my computer has been running for more than 2 hours since its last shutdown or reboot. Close the game window and CPU usage drops to less than 10%
Here goes nothing....
~Darlene~