Thanks R,

I need this to be non-intrusive. I cant/dontWantTo modify the
class definitions.  I also need to be able to read this from
notJava.  I don't think I can rely on classes implementing
deserializers since I'm not using default java serialization
format.

I'll look at ObjectStreamClass.setPrimFieldValues
and see if it does the job.

I figured this out, but its not pretty.

import sun.misc.Unsafe;

 private static Unsafe getUnsafe() {
   try {
     Field field = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
     field.setAccessible(true);
     return (Unsafe)field.get(null);
   } catch (Exception ex) {
     throw new RuntimeException("can't get Unsafe instance", ex);
   }
 }
 private static final Unsafe unsafe__ = getUnsafe();
 private static void setBoolean(Field f, Object o, boolean v) {
   unsafe__.putBoolean(o, unsafe__.objectFieldOffset(f), v);
 }
 private static Object newInstance(Class clazz) throws Exception {
   return(unsafe__.allocateInstance(clazz));
 }