Well, PixieSlide can do everything Pixie can. Pixie uses a smaller viewer applet, but currently the difference is only about 3k. If you need the extra functionality of PixieSlide - namely, slide shows and ImageMaps - anywhere on your web site it is probably best to use PixieSlide throughout, and not bother with Pixie. That way visitors will only have to download one applet rather than two.
If you don't need PixieSlide's extra features, or if you are really concerned about initial delays on the first page a visitor sees, use Pixie.
Try re-reading the sections ConvPxi batchfile or shell script and Running the Pixie converter. Also check the documentation on your Java interpreter - make sure you can run other Java programs.
Does the converter produce a the message like: "Warning: record type name [number] was ignored"? This often means you are trying to convert a metafile that contains nothing but one big bitmap. Quite a lot of paint programs have an "Export as WMF" option that produces files like this. Pixie can't do anything with these metafiles because it is a vector program, and they don't have any real vector information in them. You need to use a vector graphics program to generate the metafile.
I'm sorry; the Pixie viewers don't currently support printing. This is because the old versions of Java don't support it, and if Pixie didn't use an old version of Java old browsers wouldn't be able to see the images at all.
This is almost certainly a bug in the browser, not in Pixie. The best solution is to upgrade the browser, because it will probably crash with other Java applets as well. With any power feature - JavaScript, frames, style sheets, forms, whatever - there's always a chance that someone will bring out a new browser that doesn't support it properly. You and visitors to your site should be aware that using a newly released product has a certain risk. If you can't tolerate that risk, don't use Java applets such as Pixie on your site.
Actually there is another solution. Write a server-side CGI script which detects the browser from the User-Agent field in HTTP headers, and serves a non-Java version of the page if it is not sure the browser can cope with Java. This approach is similar to using a .GIF as a fallback for browsers which are not Java-enabled, except that it puts the intelligence in the server instead of the browser.
Here are the browser versions that I know to have Java problems.
Netscape Navigator 4.02 and 4.03
Please let me know if you come across any other problems. I will try to keep this list up to date.