 <p>The solution is quite easy:</p> <p>You can provide the jacob.dll (and your 3rd party dll for that matter) as part of your applet - so there is no local installation in any directory necessary. Jacob itself provides a quite nice applet example for that:</p> <p>Download the jacob source from <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacob-project/files/jacob-project/1.17/jacob-1.17_src.zip/download" rel="nofollow">here</a> and have a look at the applet example:</p> <pre><code>jacob-1.XX\samples\com\jacob\samples\applet </code></pre> <p>There is a readme.txt file exactly describing what you must do - it even supplies an example applet calling some native activeX component to demonstrate its feasibility. It doesn't get easier than that...</p> <p>Update:</p> <p>To deploy an applet using an jnlp file have a look <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/index-142562.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p>