RecoverPoint Management Application login woes

Here's another off-topic post, written in the hopes that it can save at least one person from hours of frustration.

I was unable to log in to my RecoverPoint management application. I don't know what precipitated it. It worked for many months, until it didn't. It's certainly something to do with Java, but I don't know exactly what.

The application would appear to launch normally (i.e., slowly!), until I got to the point of logging in. I'd enter my credentials, and it would reply with "Failed to connect to RPA (ip address of RPA). Connection Failed".

I was able to SSH into the RPA, so I knew it wasn't a locked account or bad password.

I run mostly in a VM, so I tried my host OS and got the same result. I tried another PC, and was able to get in, so it clearly was something local to my PC.

I futzed around with Java -- checking my version (I was already on the latest), clearing the cache, uninstalling/reinstalling, disabling version 7 in the hopes that 6 would work. Nothing helped. It actually got worse -- on Chrome, my browser of choice, it started to ask every time to upgrade to the latest version of Java, even though I already had it. I couldn't even launch the app. On Firefox, I could at least launch it, but I still couldn't log in.

I was so desperate, I even tried Internet Explorer. Same result.

I started poking around in the Java Control Panel to see if I could find anything. On a whim, I switched my proxy setting from "Use browser settings" to "Use proxy server" and filled in my proxy server details. Mind you, these are the same settings my browser has. So it shouldn't have fixed a thing. But it did. As long as I have specific proxy settings for Java, it works; when I take them out, it doesn't.

Here are the versions of the various parts: Windows XP SP3; RecoverPoint 3.5 SP1; Java 7 update 40.