cleaning up very carefully

  Executive Summary of my question: Can you dispose a Swing
  GUI component (or all of the Swing GUI) while processing an
  event generated from this very GUI component?

  More elaborated:

  You all know

frame.setDefaultCloseOperation( javax.swing.JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE );

  , but I have found that the EDT (and thus the JVM) will also
  terminate once all disposable Swing components are disposed.

  So, when I get a ?QUIT? command (i.e., from the application menu),
  I dispose all Swing components, and the application exits. I like
  this, because when I forget to dispose a single Swing component
  in my cleanup, this error will immediatly be observable, because
  in this case, the application will not exit anymore.

  Now, I had no idea, whether it is OK to dispose the whole view of
  the Swing application, including the JFrame and the very QUIT
  menu entry whose message I am just processing during the processing
  of the message from that menu entry itself. When I will return to
  Swing, will Swing be shocked to learn that the GUI component
  whose message was just being processed does not exist anymore?
  Does it need this component to finish the processing of an event
  that was created by this component. (After all, a reference to
  the component might still be contained in the event.)

  So I tried to be very careful and do one indirection as follows:

if( message instanceof QuitMainCommand )
{ javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater
  ( new java.lang.Runnable()
    { public void run()
      { MainFrame.this.dispose(); }} ); }

  This is the code for the QUIT menu item. The ?MainFrame.this.dispose()?
  will dispose the JFrame and the menu including the QUIT menu item, whose
  message I am just processing. Because, I do not know whether this is
  legal, I call my dispose code indirectly via invokeLater. But is this
  really necessary?

  BTW: I am aware that ?instanceof? can be a code smell. I have designed
  a hierarchy of commands, and for the moment I am not aware of a better
  solution. I am (ab)using the Java class system to store a tree of
  commands, using ?instanceof? to test for subentries of a tree.