I think you'll have to gie us a bit more information to work on. I assuem you mean some sort of scrolling (text?)
applet, but in what way did it "slow down your site"?
Did the applet reaload for every page? Did the applet cache the data loaded from the server or did it keep re-reading it? How much data was the applet loading? Did the applet yield any processing to the browser (by sleeping or waiting until the data-load
thread had completed etc.).
If you can post a URL for the applet source code, someone might have a look at it and suggest some improvements.
Another view though, is that in general people hate scrolling text. If you have enough text in it to be worth reading, then why not put it on the page in the first place. If its in the page it can be found by searches (both search engines and the find button on your browser). It can include hyperlinks to other pages. It will be much quicker to load and display. People can read it at their own pace and so on.
Please let us know what text you want to put in the "scroller" (if it is, indeed, a text scroller that you are referring to) and we may have some specific suggestions to make it load and display faster.
I look forward to more information.