I had some issues with my installation of Firefox and decided to update to a new version to cure the gremlins. Ooops!! Yep, it cleared up the errors with hanging and slow response times, but Firefox has been on a crusade against Java (and perhaps with good reason) for some time now. They have completely dropped support for Java in the newer versions and have no intention of changing that stance. That's a problem if you like the Java room more than the Flash version. And it was a problem for me as my new version of Firefox would not run Java, period. So I tried to download to an earlier version of Firefox and ran into another problem. The 32bit versions of FF do Java, the 64 bit versions don't. So if you're having problems, here's a brief guide on how to probably fix it if you're using Windows.

1) Download an older version of Firefox. I'm on 45.x now, anything before 52 is okay. Make sure you get the 32 bit version.
2) Uninstall your current FF and install the older version. You won't lose your settings or bookmarks. Test at https://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp
3) If it works there, good, you're halfway home.
4) Go to the T-T site main page and see if the room applet loads. If it does, good, you're done. Ignore the rest of this. If however you get an error that the applet is blocked because of your security rules because the .JAR file is on a different domain, don't abandon hope
5) Go to your Start menu and scroll through your installed programs. Look for a Java heading and inside will be a list of things, choose "Configure Java"
6) Click the "security" tab. Look down to the "exception site list" and click "edit site list"
Click "add" and enter http://www.total-trivia.com then click ok
Click "add" again and enter http://host7.parachat.com then click ok
Click "apply".

Close your browser and restart. Go back to T-t.com and try again. It should work, or if you get a prompt asking you to allow java to run on Total-Trivia click "allow and remember". Then it should work.