If I'm not mistaken it is really hard to do something as simple as removing the focus painting for Controls.

An example is here: http://www.jensd.de/wordpress/?p=1245

I know that the way you have architected things, removing the focus might not be extremely simple. Nevertheless I quite often want to do this for different reasons. One of them being that the focus gfx in modena is far too intrusive and "hard" on the eye. Another reason is when you compose larger controls of smaller ones you might want to show the focus in the larger component and not in the smaller, internal, one.

Swing have a setFocusPainted for JButton which was very helpful.