The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. agreed to stay the antitrust order until it rules on Microsoft's appeal of the decision.

The appeals court gave no explanation for the decision. It also granted a request by both sides to hear the appeal on an expedited basis.

At issue is a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore on Dec. 23 designed to remedy Microsoft's past antitrust violations and level the playing field between Java and Microsoft's .NET Web service software.

Microsoft has asked the appeals court to overturn Motz's order, which would require Microsoft to begin putting Sun's Java into Windows within 120 days after the order is entered.

In the meantime, the company sought the stay in an emergency motion filed on Jan. 22, calling Motz's must-carry order "extreme and unprecedented."

Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said on Monday that company officials were "pleased" by the decision to stay Motz's order.

"We believed all along that it's appropriate that this matter be decided by the (appeals) court before we would move forward with our process of implementing the injunction," Desler said.

Sun Microsystems legal affairs vice president Lee Patch said company officials "regret" the decision to stay Motz's order.

"The preliminary injunctions granted by the District Court will benefit consumers and for the Java Community's developers, enterprises and system vendors," Patch said. "We will work actively to ensure that the earliest possible date is set for the appellate hearing."

CLAIM OF SABOTAGE

Sun said in a statement that both sides probably will be ready to present their arguments to the appellate court during the last week of March.

The antitrust lawsuit filed by Santa Clara, California-based Sun charges Microsoft has tried to sabotage Sun's Java software, which can run on a variety of operating systems, not just Windows.

In his Dec. 23 ruling, Motz concluded that Sun had a good chance of winning its case against Microsoft and granted a preliminary injunction forcing Microsoft to include Java in Windows.

Motz said the contest between Java and .NET could "tip" in favor of .NET because of Microsoft's past misdeeds. However, he agreed to stay his 120-day requirement for two weeks to give the appellate court time to consider Microsoft's appeal.

Microsoft attorneys argued that Motz's order would be a mistake because Sun had not shown that it would suffer immediate and "irreparable" harm without it.

Without an additional stay from the appeals court, Microsoft engineers will have to start work on putting Java into Windows once the two-week period runs out.

Motz has been assigned cases arising from the landmark government antitrust suit filed in 1998.

A settlement of the government suit was endorsed by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in November, although Massachusetts and West Virginia are appealing.

Kollar-Kotelly rejected the Java must-carry idea, one of several additional sanctions that some state attorneys general wanted her to impose.