The following will not show the image nor will it throw any exceptions. Not
throwing exceptions doesn't surprise me because the documentation show that
it won't. That is a little surprising in itself. I am not using Swing
components.

public void paint(Graphics g){

String fileName = "dir/a.gif";
Toolkit toolkit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
Image img = toolkit.getImage(fileName);

// an awt panel's Graphics context doesnot show the image
g.drawImage(img, 0,0, null);

//this works fine
g.drawString("aString",50,50);

}

thanks, mike