It does a lot of magic. I was going to mention that to albertoc and it handles the reading and saving of preferences, all you have to do is put the component on the pane. I think the LocationComboBox is like that, although I didn't create it yea, most of my gripes are probably about old code.
Any code is better than no code.
I think it just adds clutter. If it's to keep around an old copy, that's what cvs is for. One good idea is to let us write modules. Some of the Java editors have plug-ins. I know my code wont get trashed down the line.