A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
Swing components that contain "hidden" pointers should use weak references. The current "hard" references (ex: TreePath inside JTree) prevent garbage collection and promote "memory leaks".

JUSTIFICATION :
There are several cases in Swing where components created by the user are added to internal lists or other inaccessible data structure that prevent the user-supplied objects from being collected until the parent component is freed.

For example, if a frame is created and then several dialogs are created with that frame as parent, the dialogs will not be freed until the parent frame is. Some of the dialog may contain very large data structures.

EXPECTED VERSUS ACTUAL BEHAVIOR :
EXPECTED -
The only "hard" references to user components should be "resettable" to null or other values to allow the original objects to garbage collectable.
ACTUAL -
See above.

CUSTOMER SUBMITTED WORKAROUND :
Difficult. Use a profiler tool/heap walker to find objects that are still referenced and explicitly set to null.
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