Applet problem in Internet explorer

[decoy]

Hi,
Just wondering if anybody has experianced any problems with
threading of applets in IE (especially when relating to socket writes).
I have an applet that kicks off a thread to read a file and send it
over a socket:

BufferedOutputStream newOut = new BufferedOutputStream(out);
File file = new File(filename);
InputStream in = new FileInputStream( file );

int buffer = 16 * 1024;
byte[] buf = new byte[buffer];
int bytesRead;

while ((bytesRead = in.read(buf)) != -1)
{
newOut.write(buf, 0, bytesRead);
}
newOut.close();
in.close();


The code works fine in firefox, but for IE regardless of how many
sleeps I place in the thread total control goes to the applet and the
browser window stops responding (or even repainting).

Thanks in advance.