Which platform are you running on? (Win/Lin/...)
I had two really bad days figuring out what my first really really simple draft for the
scjd application was doing instead drawing the swing-ui.
It looks like my program is fine, but swing is buggy, at least with windooze/ati (and not watching a movie on the desktop ;-) ) Have a look at the
Swing Bug thread. If you don't mind, please try the switch from my posting, if you experience major speedups, too.