A: 

It turn out it is a JRE bug. As my console env is 1.5 and swing is 1.6:

Bug reference: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6554519 http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6434149

We need to pass this arguemnt to the JVM

-Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true

Aaron