Testing signed applets with NetBeans

I’m trying to convert an application to an applet–I need to read the user’s home directory, and read files from the local disk. I’ve done similar things before, but now it’s not working and I have no idea why. I get an AccessControlException when trying to read the home directory, just like I would if I had tried to run the applet from a web page without signing it first. I noticed this line had been added to my VM Options:

-Djava.security.policy=applet.policy

I removed it, but NetBeans put it back the next time I ran the applet. Is there any way to stop this? Having to open a command prompt and sign the applet just to test something would be really annoying (and I haven’t even tried that yet).