It's not so much a standard but a least common denominator... for instance, my laptop's LCD display cannot refresh at anything BUT 60Hz... (60hz on CRTs gives me a headache in minutes, but this doesnt)

Some people have monitors that refresh >100Hz. EVERYONE can do 60hz...

I'm just talking out of my *** here, but would it be possible to create a layer class that would act like an Image but would allow for toggling a custom alpha blending (transparency, not masking) for future drawing operations on it?

Some sort of Image with an ImageProducer/ImageConsumer setup comes to mind.

In my "adventures" with BufferStrategy and it's ilk, I've read through the code for both Component implementations of BufferStrategy and at least FlipBufferStrategy won't let you use less than 2. I'm not sure about Blit... I guess he can't be using 1 buffer if he's using flipping.

Maybe, if he's using active rendering, his paint method is still being called and that could have something to do with it. Probably not.

We need more info, is what.