This error may be caused by a Sun Java bug that has been fixed in a newer Java update.
As a workaround, try downloading and installing the most recent JRE 1.5 update release and set the system environment variable MATLAB_JAVA to point to that JRE installation.
Complete instructions for doing so are located at:
There are no API compatibility issues between update releases of Java 5.
As a last resort you could also try using Java 6. However there is at least one known issue with the documentation browser when running Java 6 with a pre 2008a release of MATLAB.
You can work around this issue by executing the command:
com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HTMLRenderer.setUseWebRenderer(false);
Followed by a MATLAB restart. This will switch them over to the old HTML rendering component (used before R2006b), which has somewhat worse HTML rendering but at least won't crash.
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