After much experimentation with my display settings I found the solution to my problem with garbled user interface issues when using Limewire with Java 1.5. Hopefully it may prove useful to others who are having graphical glitch issues (such as blank white screens).

I'm using a ViewSonic 924 TFT monitor and a GeForce 7800GTX. In the nVidia display settings tools there's a menu option called Digital Flat Panel Settings (directly above Quality & Performance Settings on my setup using nVidia drivers 81.95).

In Digital Flat Panel Settings You have various options for selecting how your monitor centres the display. My options show the following:

Display adapter scaling

Centered output

Monitor scaling

Fixed aspect ration scaling.

Mine was set to Display adapter scaling so I changed this to Centered output and discovered that all my Limewire garbled graphics problems vanished and is now working fine.

This suggests that Limewire or the Java runtime is simply doing a poor job at working with standard Windows display device drivers for popular graphics cards and can't recognise that scaling has been applied to the display. It's just odd that all non-Java applications do not have a problem with this when rendering their UI.

Now I'm not sure how those of you with regular CRT monitors who have graphical glitches with Limewire will fix this as I would assume that the Digital Flat Panel Settings in the nVidia display settings does not exist. So you should browse through your video card's display settings looking for anything that might relate to display scaling.