No Change.. I had it that way originally.

I'm going to break up the logic so the screen capture and jLabel have
their own threads, since I'm working on a dual core system, this might
help since I've noticed the performance is heavily based on the CPU
speed.

I've actually compared my results to VNC "visually", and they look the
same to my eyes when it comes to testing the start menu response. I've
found that to be a very good test of performance. I think unless it's
going to take something simple to fix it, for my project it's fine.
I'm just doing this as a fun learning experience.

Thanks for your time! I appreciate your efforts. I'll remember to give
usable code in the future. I guess in my head I was expecting  there
to be some sort of obvious problem with my code. Not sure about your
"not a good project for a newbie" comment though.. I'm not new to
programming, I'm just newer to Java, and I've never done anything
multi-threaded so I figured this project would be good. Either way,
I'm moving on because I'm having fun.

I changed the screen area size captured to the full desktop resolution
and found that your application isn't any faster then mine. However,
your comments and code gave me some idea's on improving mine, and I've
gained about 5fps.

This is what I've come up with for the code (the GUI is in a seperate
class file, and isn't included)

import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Image;
import java.awt.Rectangle;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import javax.swing.ImageIcon;

public class ThreadedTest_HelperV2 extends Thread {

   ThreadTest_Form myForm;

   public ThreadedTest_HelperV2(ThreadTest_Form parent) {
       this.myForm = parent;
   }

   public void run() {
       int i = 0;
       int fps = 0;
       Robot robot = null;
       Image screen_capture = null;

       Rectangle screen = new
Rectangle(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize());
       int scaleX =
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize().width / 4;
       int scaleY =
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize().height / 4;
       myForm.setSize(scaleX+5, scaleY+25);

       long t0 = System.currentTimeMillis();
       while (true) {
           i++;
           long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
           int seconds = (int) (t1-t0) / 1000;

           if (seconds > 1) {
               fps = i / seconds;
               myForm.setTitle("FPS: " + fps);
           }
           else
               myForm.setTitle("FPS: Analyzing..");

           try {
               robot = new java.awt.Robot();
               screen_capture =
robot.createScreenCapture(screen).getScaledInstance(scaleX, scaleY,
Image.SCALE_FAST);
           } catch (AWTException e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
               System.exit(-1);
           }

           myForm.jLabel1.setIcon(new ImageIcon(screen_capture));
           myForm.jLabel1.update(myForm.jLabel1.getGraphics());
       }
   }
}

The only real issue I've come up with using this code is that my
jframe/jlabel (can't tell which) flickers a bit. I've read that this
is because you aren't supposed to update swing elements inside a
thread, but I'm still working on separating the logic. Running into
problems with this since I keep getting "non-static blah blah must be
set to static" when trying to modify objects.

Any hints?