Sorry for posting a J++ question as I am not yet on .net

I have developped an applet in Visual J++ 6.0 and I encounter the
situation that the when it runs in debug mode everything is fine, but
when I run in release mode, the execution is 30 (thirty!) times
slower. I didnt encounter this problem before and I use J++ since 2
years already. Apart from a corrupted J++ I cannot image what the
reason could be.
Any hints?
Thank you,
Claude