Solved!Bah. It was something reasonably obvious. By calling
getParameter in the constructor, I wasn't waiting for the
init() method to be called, where presumably all the setting up gets done. So it just wasn't ready for me to start asking it stuff.
Thanks for all your suggestions.
I've not done a whole lot of Applet programming, and I'm a little stumped by an exception I'm getting in my code. Was hoping someone might be able to give me a hand. It has to do with getting parameters from the html file loading the applet. Maybe I'm just being dense.
( The Important BitsCollapse ) 
confused