Exit from a Frame without resorting to System.exit()

Question

This is driving me nuts.
I've got a really simple problem, actually... I've got a Frame and I'm trying to get rid of it so my application will exit.
Though using System.exit() seems to be the most common way to get an application to exit, I'd prefer to avoid going that route. My program uses multiple threads, and I want to give them all a chance to exit gracefully before the application exits, as opposed to terminating them all quite suddenly. All the threads monitor a boolean value, "exiting", and terminate, after some cleanup, when the variable is set. Using join() on all the threads before using System.exit() would work, except any number of threads may be created by the program, and not all of them will be accessible by the function doing the exiting!
If I simply omit the call to System.exit(), and remove the Frame with dispose(), the threads all shut down properly, and the program appears to have exited, except the command prompt doesn't reappear until I hit Ctrl-C.
So I looked up the docs for the dispose() method. It was slightly different than I remembered... Obviously, that method is not the way to shut down a Frame. What is?

Answer 1

So I looked up the docs for the dispose() method. It
was slightly different than I remembered...
Obviously, that method is not the way to shut down a
Frame. What is?The problem is that once you use some GUI, a pool of AWT threads is created and they are not shut down, not even if there is no more GUI visible.
Look at these other threads for some explanation on this behaviour an workarounds:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=5&threadID=10901
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=57&threadID=122569