After an application was upgraded from using 7u21 to using 8u51, there are many NullPointerException thrown.

On debugging, it was found SwingUtilities.<method_name> threw NPE over the RMI calls.

Following are some problem and stack traces:

1: Creating any Swing component in RMI thread throws NPE. In our application we create JRadioButton in RMI thread which throws the following exception:
Exception in thread "Thread-339" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at javax.swing.SwingUtilities.appContextGet(Unknown Source)
        at javax.swing.JComponent.getDefaultLocale(Unknown Source)
        at javax.swing.JComponent.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at javax.swing.AbstractButton.<init>(Unknown Source)

2: On calling invokeLater(), invokeAndWait(), isEventDispatchThread() methods, RMI thread throws NPE.
These are the methods where we see the exception and there are other methods in SwingUtilities which throw NPE:
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImplPP(Unknown Source)
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImplPP(Unknown Source)
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImpl(Unknown Source)

3: Appending text to JTextArea in RMI thread is throwing NPE:
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImplPP(Unknown Source)
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImplPP(Unknown Source)
        at sun.awt.SunToolkit.getSystemEventQueueImpl(Unknown Source)
        at java.awt.Toolkit.getEventQueue(Unknown Source)

Looks the issues persist since 7u25. Tried the same with latest JRE i.e. 8u65 but the issues persist there too.

JDK-8135232 looks similar and is unresolved in 8u45.

Using SwingRmiHelper.invokelater [1] instead of SwingUtilities.invokelater didn't help.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/7u51-relnotes-2085002.html
Area: deploy/webstart
Synopsis: Webstart applications that use RMI with SwingUtlities.invokeLater or invokeAndWait throw an NPE.