Applets using enviromental variables?

Hello everyone,

this is my first post here and I'm not a person who, to be honest, has any real understanding of JAVA. I'm just confronted with it at work and have to see how I can sneak myself trough it. So I beg you're pardon in advance if I seem a bit unknowing...it probably is because I am :P

So here I got a question for you folks an JAVA-Pros out there:

Let's assume I'm on a Windows XP. I set an enviromental variable under System>Advanced>EV : _JAVA_OPTIONS=-Djava.io.tmpdir=D:\TEMP. In wich cases will this variable be put to use?

I ask because I have an applet which I want to use this global variable, but it seems to just ignore it and uses the common TEMPDIR defined in Windows instead.

Maybe someone in here can straighten that out for me a bit.

Thanks a lot in advance

sincerely

Nicholas Bergmann