Not much. Directory selection was broken right from the beginning, and
this hasn't changed. You can search Sun's bug parade and vote for any
related bug - if you find them in the mess, and if they are not closed.
Or you can write an own bug report to Sun.

Don't hold you breath. JFileChooser was and is broken in many strange
ways. It is IMHO the second worst Swing component (JTable being the
worst). But the really sad thing is, not much is about to change in the
future, too. Sun just doesn't have its priorities right. E.g.instead of
spending time to fix the !@#$%^&* thing, Sun spent time when going from
1.3 to 1.4 to change the scrolling from vertical to horizontal. I mean,
come on, just because Windows until then had the most broken file
chooser in the world, thanks to its horizontal scrolling, Sun shouldn't
try to compete for that title. But they did, and they got the title :-(

Since you didn't show us your hack, how can we judge? But it can't be
worse than the original code. May I guess? You walk down the
JFileChooser's component hierarchy, until you found the components you
need to mess with (using instanceof), you add event listeners and bang
the !@#$%^&* thing over the head when the event is fired?

/Thomas

I guess you'll just have to show me some code that demonstrates this.  
I've got at least two places in my app where a JFileChooser is used to
select a directory, and it does not exhibit this behavior.  Nor do I
have any special workaround implemented.

I preset my chooser's starting directory.  I set the dialog title.  I
change its "Open" button to read "Select".  And then I call its
showOpenDialog method.  That's it.  When I click on a directory, its
name ends up there as it should.  When I double-click it, I navigate
into it as I should.  When I click the "Select" button, the named item
is chosen and returned to my application.  Simple -- and correct
behavior.  And it's working on Linux (a few flavors I'm aware of) as
well as multiple Windows versions we're currently supporting.

BTW, all this is in Sun's 1.4.2.

= Steve =

this problem does not appears with 1.4.2.

for earlier versions use following workaround:

       chooser.addPropertyChangeListener(new PropertyChangeListener() {
           public void propertyChange(PropertyChangeEvent e) {
               String name = e.getPropertyName();
               if(name.equalsIgnoreCase("directoryChanged")) {
                   chooser.setSelectedFile(new File(""));
               }
           }
       });