Buss, are you 100 percent sure there isn't some code being executed? I would
test things using the custom event queue described in this article.
http://elliotth.blogspot.com/2005/05/automatically-detecting-awt-event.html If you have some heavy processes going on, it should help you detect them. Next I'll plug my own stuff and recommend reading the Desktop Java Live sample chapters available from the link below on Swing threading.
http://www.sourcebeat.com/TitleAction.do?id=10 Moving these processes off the event dispatch
thread should resolve your issues. If you don't have long running EDT processes, my next suggestion would be to look into Swing performance issues resolving video
cards. There are probably a bunch of them either open or closed for newer versions at bugs.sun.com. Depending on the version of Java you are running, there use to be some switches to use different pipelines which would help things.
Scott Delap
ClientJava.com Desktop Java Live