George,
Oracle introduced some new security features in JAVA 1.7 and JAVA 1.8. One of the methods to overcome this issue is to add the URL to the JAVA Exception Site List. This is a "work around" and I have seen various SAP Notes where the issue was resolved by either a component update or updating the kernel.
Unfortunately we hit this issue in our CRM landscape and have applied SPS 8 and updated the kernel to 742_REL patch 211 and none of these efforts resolved the situation. I have opened an incident with SAP and its currently in BC-FES-ITS. We are not interested in deploying the work around to thousands of desktops.
Cheers,
Dan Mead