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Transparent Frames

AWT does not allow part of a frame to be transparent. But, you can grab the screen background and show it in the frame. For code snippets, look at Irregular Frame Shape.

There is a new java.awt.noerasebackground property since 1.4, but I have not been able to make a frame transparent by changing that property and setting opaque property of all contained components to true. Perhaps this will be fixed in a newer version of Swing.