Thank you for the information.

<<It's been around for a while, and looks like it could be an Apple VM problem, but so far has been very hard to pinpoint.>>

If it was an Apple VM problem lots of other Java apps would be reporting it, too. Agreed, it's probably something Apple is contributing to, but...

I'm going out on a limb here, because I have no idea of the LW programming environment, but it seems like something that would have taken the old time programmers, who were forced to work intimately with the hardware, only a short time to find, what with breakpoints and such. In a modern multi-tasking operating system environment those tools are not as readily available. And the programmers, too, look at things differently. They work at a much higher level, using compilers that are virtually machine independent (the word "virtually" seems to be what's biting us, here). In fact, many of them have no idea of what's actually going on inside the machine because to them it's a black box that gets the job done. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But that being said, it would seem fairly straightforward to cause breaks in operation at critical points, like requesting and deallocating VM, then checking to see if it actually happened, before going on.

Jay