So does my question not warrant a response, or do I have you all stumped?

I cannot be sure if this is relevant to your problem, but I found this when researching the same exception when trying to use Sun’s JCE:

“Due to a bug in the Java 2 SDK, you must list the “SUN” provider as the first security provider when loading a signed JAR file.”

If you can, dump your list of providers (loop through array from Security.getProviders() ) and make sure “SUN” is first. If another provider is before it (in particular “IAIK”) you may want to get pre-emptive and add those providers to your java.security file after ‘security.provider.1=sun.security.provider.Sun’, or do it dynamically from your code with something like:

Provider provider = new iaik.security.provider.IAIK();
Security.removeProvider(provider.getName());
Security.addProvider(provider);

This resolved my problem with getting that exception.