I've noticed that some applet viewers sometimes will do weird things
when you restart an applet. Specifically, the old components don't get
done away with when you restart, so you end up with twice the number of
components. E.g., if you have an applet with one TextField, when you
restart, you'll have two TextFields. I just saw this behavior in the
Solaris appletviewer. I've seen it before in other circumstances.

Putting a removeAll() call in the destroy method seems to avoid this
problem.

Do you think I should recommend this trick? Or is it a browser bug to
not get rid of the applet's components when the applet is destroyed?
(Or are both true?)

More justification from Herb Jellinek:

- Depending on the window system, the components are probably
references to external resources which should be freed as early as
possible. But users don't have the kind of control over deallocation
of Components that they have with, say, Graphics contexts, so they
can't (shouldn't) explicitly dispose() of them.

- The components are unusable after destroy() - so why keep them
around? They waste precious memory.

- Keeping them around makes debugging certain types of programs much,
much harder. This was our experience doing Kona.

In addition, I (Kathy) believe that applet writers are told that they should
never depend on the destroy() method being called.
Reproduce:
Go to this directory:
    ~kwalrath/WS/docs/src/tutorial/applet/overview/example-1.1
Enter this:
    appletviewer ScrollingSimple.html
Click restart.
Thanks...
--Kathy Walrath