1.4.2 beta still has repaint issues

Question

Sorry guys. I know I have kvetched about this time
and again in these forums. I know that some of you
have found workarounds and solutions to your similar
problems, and I am happy for you.
I had hoped that 1.4.2 would be be better, but I just
tested the beta version and there is no difference.
Here is a description of the problem. It is a complex
applet. Components within components within components.
Initially the applet paints itself fine, but once occluded,
it will not repaint. The only exception is the lowest
level imbedded components, which are components inside
a JEditorPane and do repaint. Everything else in applet will
not repaint.
The applet has worked fine in Java Runtime environments since
1.1.8, and it still works fine as late as 1.3.1_06. Right now
our customer, understandably, does not want to pay for a
debugging effort for what is apparently a regression in the
Java runtime. They are satisfied to stay with 1.3.1_06, though
this does create client-side hassles and becomes less and less
viable into the future.
If anyone is experiencing similar problems, has a workaround,
or a simpler test case that reproduces the problem, I would be
grateful to know about it. Thanks.

Answer 1

Ultimately, we had two problems which we needed to fix
in order to qualify our application on 1.4.*.
First, the repaint issue concerned some code that we had
written to workaround issues in the ComponentView used
inside the text pane. We had problems with the initial
display of embedded components because at start-up time:
the event queue had not started up, and the default
component view had deferred some sizing computations via
the "invokeLater" mechanism. We fixed this at the time
by writing our own ComponentView class based on the Java
source of the time. This approach was invalidated by changes
to the graphics pipeline in 1.4.x. The solution was to
write a new local version of ComponentView. We would prefer,
of course, a more standard approach. The deferment of the
component sizing is still an issue, and Sun has accepted this
defect as a bug/enhancement-request (Bug Id 4851010).
After fixing the repaint issue, we still had problems due to
changes in the focus model on 1.4.x. We had been using a
static JInternalFrame to float a tool palette for pumping
special characters into our text pane. We discovered that
this caused us to lose keyboard focus when the applet restarted.
The solution to that was to make the tool palette non-static.
Now we think we are ready to go with 1.4.x!
Hope this gives you a clue you can use.