Forms doesn't launch from self service

This is one of my favorite problems. I have posted about this problem before. The problem exhibited is same but the cause is always different. Here's the latest one I found. In one of the releases last year, I had tried to push Sun JRE client and replace Jinitiator. At that time, Sun JRE client was an early adopter program and was not certified. During testing, the team faced the lost focus problem and there was so much hue and cry that it was abandoned. In 2008, a new release and a new clone, I am told about a problem where Jinitiator doesn't launch on clicking any of the forms based options. Strangely it works on some PCs and doesn't work on others. It works on all DBA's PCs but doesn't work on the PCs of the people who have to do the actual testing. One common thing I noticed is that on the PCs where this was working, it was working with IE but not with Firefox. Launching with Firefox would give the message, you require to install Sun JRE 1.5.0_07. After almost half a day of trying out different stuff, Akhilesh suggested that we check the appsweb.cfg file and found that it had the plugin=jdk instead of plugin=jinit. Once this was changed to plugin=jinit and Apache was bounced, it started working for everyone. And yes it started working in Firefox browser too. A quick comparison of the context files revealed the variable s_sun_plugin whose value was set to jinit in a working instance and set to jdk in case of this instance.