This article from Sun (found here) has proved itself useful in solving a wierd problem that bugged me for over an hour earlier this week, whereby everytime I tried to hide some text that a third party component was printing (by making it the same colour as the background – per the vendors docs) it caused a totally unrelated section of the display to vanish as well. I finally fixed it by passing the component a font with zero size, but it turns out that the Graphics object has a handy ‘create’ method for making copies which can be used to isolate components from each other. It would appear that the supplied component made some changes to the Graphics object which were infecting other parts of the display. I love it when a mystery is solved.

One caveat: the ‘destroy’ method mentioned in the article is actually called ‘dispose’. Always write code samples inside an IDE!