Hi Ron,
I found the following at this address
http://mindprod.com/jglossinterned.html where there is a lot of interesting informations
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Intern and garbage Collection
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In the early JDKs, any string you interned could never be garbage collected because the JVM had to keep a reference to in its Hashtable so it could check each incoming string to see if it already had it in the pool. With JDK 1.3 came weak references. Now unused intered strings will be garbage collected.
Hope this help