A "quick and dirty" fix for these, if you happen to stumble into a site which uses them, is to disable Javascript (which is the mechanism by which the page you are viewing calls them up.)
To do this in IE go to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Custom Level, and then scroll down until you find "Scripting of Java applets" and set to "Disable".
You can run with these disabled permanently which makes your browsing a litle safer, but
some sites may not display correctly -- the truly paranoid amongst us consider this to be a feature
