I ran into the problem with static data in an inner class recently.
This site
Nested Classes gives a good short description of inner classes. A non-static inner class is associated with an instance of a class, not the class itself. That's why the inner class can access "this" for the enclosing class. So declaring something static in the inner class would only be accessable to that instance, which defeats the purpose of it being static. If you don't need direct access to the enclosing class instance (this, or its members directly), try declaring the inner class static.
[ May 17, 2005: Message edited by: Erik Larson ]