I'll give you an answer below.  For the moment, though, consider very
hard whether you really want to do this.  When you do this, you are
assuming that your controls will always be the same size that they were
on the platform where you first designed the GUI.  There are a number of
reasons that may not be the case:

   1. People may have increased default font sizes for accessibility
      reasons.

   2. Your program may have been localized to a different language, and
      the new text on buttons is too long to fit in the space you left.

   3. The program may be run on a different operating system that does
      some GUI thing differently, such as a different-sized title bar
      on the window, or different font sizes.

   4. Someone may resize the window.  (Or if you prevent resizing the
      window, one of the people who curse your name as a result might
      end up as a maintenance programmer on the project and decide to
      fix your mistake.)

It's not naively difficult, no.  The part you are missing is that you
need to get rid of the default layout managers first.

   AboutBox.setLayout(null);
   getContentPane().setLayout(null);

You'll need to do that to any container that you add components to, if
you plan to manually set their location and size.  Incidentally, you
might find setBounds a little more convenient for setting location and
size at once.

One more comment.  Your own code is your business, but when you're
posting to newsgroups it is far less confusing if you use standard Java
naming conventions.  Reading code like the above can be difficult
without context, just because 99% of your readers will assume that
anything called AboutBox or AboutBox_Image must be a class, not a
variable.

The universal naming conventions for Java say:

   Classes: capitalized, intermediate caps, no underscores
            MyClassName
   Methods: camel caps, no underscores
            myMethodName
   Fields: camel caps, no underscores
            myFieldName
   Constant Fields: All caps, intermediate underscores
            MY_CONSTANT_NAME
   Local variables: not capitalized, uses vary between camel caps and
                    underscores, with strong bias to camel caps
            myLocalVariable (or rarely, my_local_variable)

I highly suggest you stop comparing Java with C++ (which doesn't even
have a standard GUI toolkit) and instead start learning the language and
then principles behind it. E.g. Sun's GUI tutorial explains why there is
a need for layout managers, and so does this group's FAQ, and many
previous discussions - which you could have looked up in an archive of
this group.

In short, you want to write non-portable GUIs. Go ahead. Do it, but
please don't come back here later and whine about your GUI not working
on another OS or VM.

You must not. You are free to write non-portable GUIs all the way you
want. I don't see a reason why you need Java for this, but go ahead.

/Thomas

yourContainer.setLayout(null);

No, but it was an intermediate "hack" way back when because they
didn't support null layouts in the designer at the time. Now they do.