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Open a project that contains icons whose images use relative path, the IDE will show a blank in the Icon property eventhough the code (generated by Netbeans 5.5.1) contains following: myCheckbox.setIcon(new javax.swing.ImageIcon(".\\images\\myIcon.png")); If one uses the External Image option in the Image Chooser and enters the relative path then clicks OK, the relative path is converted to an absolute path. I realise there are other options (such as Image within Project in the Image Chooser or Custom Code) but they all required making numerous changes in a lot of existing code that was build outside of Netbeans 6.0
Reassigning to "form".
It really is not possible to enter a relative path in the current icon property editor. In fact, this use-case was unsupported in the previous version as well (it was possible to enter the relative path, but no icon was shown in design time). Unfortunately, there are some users (like you) who used this approach. It is much preferred to load the icons as resources (not as files). Anyway, we shouldn't silently ignore the relative path when old forms are loaded. We should either start to support it or at least suggest the user to change it to absolute path or resource name.