JComboBox

I am using a Jcombobox with 9 options to choose from. When a selection is made an event is fired, things happen, and I want to change the text that is displayed inside the combobox. Is there an easy way to do this?
The closest I could come was to totally replace the comboboxmodel that the combobox was using. This in turn reset the selected index and fired an event that I didn't want. Is there a way to turn off events for the combobox? Component(a grandparent of JComboBox) provides a disableEvent(long eventsToDisable) method, but I can't figure out what form the eventsToDisable parameter should take. I haven't seen anything about it in the docs.
Is this the only way to change that text? Is there somewhere I can find out about the eventsToDisable parameter?
Thanks,
Chris

I'm moving this thread to the Swing / AWT forum ...