First of all when I say "relatively good patent" I'm damning with faint praise. Secondly I said it about patent #8, and not about the applet one. Thirdly I'd say that the applet one is one of the weaker patents that Microsoft is using. And fourth, Microsoft do major damage even if most of their patents are rejected.

That said, the patent filing is accurate in claiming that Java was not immediately used for menus. When we look back at things that far back it is easy to confuse things we saw and did a couple of years later with what was happening at that point of time. However it didn't take long to get there. Domino 4.5 (released in December of that year, under development when the patent was filed) definitely used Java applets for menus. Lotus 4.0 released in January of that year, did a lot of stuff, but don't know if they had interactive menus. Still they clearly had the idea, even if they hadn't implemented it yet. And lots of people were doing it by the end of 1997.