Why is my Java suddenly not working with IE 7.x?

This is very strange. I have been running Vista Ultimate SP1 and Sun Java Runtime 1.6 build 7 with Internet Explorer 7.0.6001.18000. I have all of the latest Vista patches installed.

A few days ago I noticed that some of the webpages that I frequent regularly started to "freeze-up" upon trying to load. And the only way to get out the situation was to do Cntrl-Alt-Del and "force" the end of process.

I started to debug things and realized that all of my JAVA applets have stopped running. I went to www.java.com and realized that there is a newer JAVA build version. I unistalled my old one and installed the build 10.

Upon a clean reboot, and going to www.java.com and also tohttp://www.javatester.org/version.html to test that all is well but I am being told that I don't have JAVA installed on my machine (?!?!)

I went back to IE 7 and chose Tools / Internet Options / Advanced and wanted to see what IE is telling me. There is NO entry at all for JAVA inside the options! However, in my Control Panel, I do jave the JAVA icon, and it tells me that I do have it installed and it IS active for IE 7.x (the only browser on my machine) by clicking on Java Control Panel / Advanced / Default Java for browser.

However, if I click on Tools / Sun Java Console (from IE 7 main menu), nothing comes up. However if I go to "DOS" via the "CMD", and type in "java -version", it is found since it reports to me the correct version.

Anyone have any ideas what is going on? My computer is working perfectly otherwise, and I have scanned my system with Kaspersky 2009 and ran Clean My PC registry checker with NO problems found.

Any suggestions are much appreciated!