Due to a bug in Sun's Java Web Start executable in JDK 1.4.2_07 for Linux, I am not able to use it as-is on a system with glibc 2.3.4 and kernel 2.6.11. As should be obvious, if they had made it truly Free, I could have easily fixed the problem and moved on with my life. Since it is not, I have to either use an alternative like OpenJNLP or somehow work around this bug.
On a system where this bug does not manifest itself, I used "ps --columns 2000 -e -o "%a" | grep javaws" to grab the command line that is used by this executable to spawn the Java VM. I tried modifying this command line for my system (adjusting paths) and running it but it failed trying to download the JVM from Sun's site. After a bit of snooping around, I found out that it was looking for a file named "deployment.properties" in "$HOME/.java/.deployment" that is populated by the wrapper executable with the information on the JRE being used. So I just copied this file over from the system where stuff works and adjusted the paths. It finally worked as expected, albeit without the splash screen (which I do not regret losing at all).
Acrobat Reader
If you remove the utterly useless plug-ins from the Acrobat Reader installation folder, it starts up much faster.