Hmmm I've seen this also with ATI Radeon series display adapters. Fortunately I have never suffered the catastrophic effects other members have.

I had a minor issue with my display adapter(Radeon 300 series), when I run LW and configure the display adapter to run the monitor and tv at the same time. The monitor display becomes sluggish, slow to respond. I disabled the tv function and every thing returned to normal.

So for now I just live with it.

BTW when running the display adapter in dual mode, it doesn't effect my d/l, u/l, or connection status. Every thing still operates except for the monitor display which is slow to respond/refresh.

Just my observations on this comp.

EDIT:
Running LW pro 4.8.1 JRE 1.5.0_02. Latest ATI drivers from DELL. The latest java update seemed to help some but not completely.

Thanks for the Java links LotR