Seems that in my last session of trying to track down the problem, I managed to break it even more, so it doesn't work locally on my machine either

I have now tracked down which line of code it freezes on at least:
final Loader3DS loader = new Loader3DS();
final URL url = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("dvd.3ds");
Scene scene = null;
try {
if(url != null) {
scene = loader.load(url);
At that last line, scene = loader.load(url), the applet and browser just freezes and has to be killed using the taskmanager.