I had that problems once on a SUN machine running Solaris 7.
The problem was with the installation of the JDK.
Try reinstalling JDK. You can also try using a generic driver for your
graphics card
insteadof the ATI driver and see if it works.

Maybe this will help:

In article <CCGZd.229$_u3.217@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net>, Joe T
<joet@nospam.com> wrote:

Not that I know of - but on Linux/Unix you can use an alias, on windows, a
batch file, to invoke Java with the switch.

Eric

Actually I met the same thing yesterday and stumbled accross your
message.  My problem is: After days of not using Swing based
applications, yesterday I found that the application window of Swing
applications are plain grey/blank, even including the Java Web Start
program installed with JRE (Which is also Swing based).  The more
annoying thing is that after trying some swing applications my computer
would hang and reboot!

I tried to reinstall JRE and JDK but the problem was still there.  But
this time I found that: although the window is shown blank, the
application itself seems usable -- I could use the keyboard shortcuts
defined in my application to actually do something.  Now this seem to
me more like a display problem rather than a java installation problem.
And I recalled that a few days ago updated my Radeon 9800 driver to
the latest 5.3 catalyst and made a few changes to the acceleration
settings.

And bingo!  The problem turns out to be caused by the video
acceleration settings I had in catalyst.  Just try to turn down your
acceleration setting from probably "hight quality" to "performance" and
the Swing problem hopefully will also go away.

Cheers!