I haven’t even switched to the new applet so the certificate is not the problem. (I still don’t have extra cash laying around to through towards this)

Perhaps IE’s virtual machine (VM) has become corrupted. Try uninstalling and reinstalling IE. I know lots of other users are using the applet with IE 6.0 with no problems so something must not be working correctly on your machine.

Also, try searching microsoft.com for any related issues regarding the virtual machine. They may have a seperate download or update for it.