I believe this is a bug...

We are doing development on Windows NT 4.0 and have created a style
 customer  that encapsulates all of the color information for a graphical
 customer . Every time the graphical  customer  is painted, it fetches the color
to use from the Style  customer , which right now returns the appropriate
System Color ( e.g. return SystemColor.window ). 

The colors are correct, but it doesn't seem to support dynamic updates.
When the system colors are changed all programs dynamically update their
colors... INCLUDING HOT JAVA 1.0... but our objects being displayed
remain the OLD System colors. Causing the  customer  to be repainted has no
effect... even clicking on reload has no effect. The new System Colors
are only used when Hot Java browser is closed and restarted.


-- 
Todd A Webb, Software Engineer
NRaD Joint Maritime Command Information Systems
----------------------------------------------------------
Syzygy Technologies                  (619) 222-7255 office
3940 Hancock St., Suite 114          (619) 222-8371 Fax
San Diego, California 92110          (619) 553-4005 Lab
----------------------------------------------------------
======================================================================

N/A

He's talking about java.awt.SystemColor.  I've checked, and when NT's
idea of the system colors change, java.awt.SystemColor will sometimes
get the updated values, and sometimes won't.  I fixed his sample program
(stupid case-insensitive filesystem!) and attached it as SystemColor.tar,
with a println on the desktop color.  After changing the system color, the
println's triggered from expose events don't reflect the new color.

Strangely, though, sometimes I can get the new system colors to show up.
For example, re-loading the page often (but not always) gets me the
new system colors.  It's as if something unrelated is causing 
java.awt.SystemColor.updateSystemColors() to get called.

Anyway, this is not very important, so I'm downgrading it to a P4 and assigning
it to AWT.
  xxxxx@xxxxx   1997-07-21

-------------

3/23/2000   xxxxx@xxxxx   -- still a problem as of kestrel-rc2 (1.3.0rc2-Y) on
NT 4.0 SP6a.  Only the frame and menu bar colors change in response to a change
in the desktop/window color change from the Windows control panel.  Under
Solaris, only the frame edge and title bar change color (menu bar remains 
the previous color).


  xxxxx@xxxxx   2000-05-04
Fixed for Win32.  Added a call in awt_Toolkit to SystemColor.updateSystemColors when WM_SYSCOLOR_CHANGE occurs.  Solaris is Window Manager dependent.  This only means SystemColor will have the valid color set.  It is up to each applet or application to properly read these values when painting.

This is not very important?  Have you ever seen how stupid stand-alone
applications look when they don't pick up the correct system colors?

I agree, how can you say it's not important? Sun has to realize that everything
that makes a java app not look native is a big deal to our customers. And this
really sticks out badly. This bug is two years old!