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Two questions, a specific one and a general one.

The specific one concerns the recent (past 30 days maybe?) version of
Java that downloads and installs on my browsers.

http://www.bkgm.com/motif/go.html is a pretty good online backgammon
game that uses java. I've been playing it for years. Starting with a
March java update, the backgammon board renders incompletely, SOME
(not all) of the time. The bottom 5% of the board doesn't show up.
This happens in FF 3.0.8 and in IE7, running on XP SP3.

Reloading the page doesn't fix the problem. Clearing the cache and
reloading doesn't. Clearing cookies and reloading doesn't. Only
patience and luck will eventually bring up a fully rendered backgammon
board.

Any idea what is going on? I can't say what version of Java I'm
running because I don't know how to find the version - sorry.

Here's my unrelated general question: What's a good web-based way to
search the usenet archives? Deja News was perfect for this. Then
google groups bought it and was also perfect. In the last year or two
though google groups has morphed into something that I can't
comfortably use - most of its returned search results are from
something other than usenet, and that's all I'm trying to search. Can
google groups be somehow configured to search only usenet (like it
used to do), and if not, what's another good tool I can use that
effectively searches the entire usenet archive (or at least the past
five years or so)?