With the introduction of the named pipe transport on the Windows platform in 6651507, we are seeing intermittent, spontaneous teardowns and relaunches of applets. This appears to be happening because one of the named pipes (the reader pipe on the browser side) doesn't get hooked up correctly, so the client attached JVM gets an IOException writing one of its messages back to the browser side, and we also never get the JVMStartedMessage which would prevent relaunch of the JVMInstance hosting the applet. The writer pipe has certain error handling code for this situation and it looks like the reader pipe needs the same workaround code.