Long story short, no change from before. I played around with my Java settings some, downloaded CreoView 3.0, and no change. I could do more research, but I actually don't have customer service access for this site, so I can't access the service releases on Java Issues and Oracles' public apologies.
By way of explanation: This is through a school account, and this is the second semester (new instructor) that anyone's been required to use Windchill. It was set up poorly a couple year ago (maybe inexpertly is a better term, but it *****). So people have been continuing to use Drive, despite the cost of Windchill. I sort of took it upon myself to get it working, and I thought I got some inertia going. Fixed a lot of the Java issues, and got the DTI put on the school system. However, the guy who is actually in charge of is now pretty much indisposed figting with IT guys to get our school's server system upgraded from Win Server 2000 to something from this decade. The Workgroup Manager isn't compatible with the OS, and now that they've insisted we use a VM network it's even more important (for the record, don't try remote desktops with Solidworks. It's like playing xbox live on a dial-up connection.) So, I'm pre-emptively getting the Workgroup manager going on my personal system so that fewer students have to suffer from the difficulties of learning software while experiencing "Am I doing something wrong, or is this broken."
Sorry, that was verbose and overly familiar, you'll have to deal with it I guess 
. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated, but right now I'm kind of guessing it's an infrastructure problem that I'm not "priveleged" enough to fix.
Thanks,
AUstin