Today Apple released an official fix.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloa...acosx1039.html

Use Software Update to install, or the link to the standalone installer is also provided.

There is also a link to the more technical details of what went wrong (FYI Philippe)

Quote:

To reduce the memory footprint of Java applications, the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in Mac OS X makes use of a Java Shared Archive (JSA). The JSA contains the preprocessed internal HotSpot JVM representations of common standard Java classes that would otherwise be found and processed from the standard classes.jar file. Mac OS X 10.3.9 has exposed an issue in the use of the JSA, by which the virtual memory location of libhotspot.dylib can become incompatible with the current JSA. This can result in Java crashing on every execution.