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The New TopComponent wizard present in NB since 5.0 creates only singleton TopComponents. This is fine for many cases, but there are times when creating multiple instances of a TopComponent is desirable. While it is not difficult for an experienced platform developer to edit the code to support this, I have found (through the mailing lists and interactions with several developers who are learning the platform) that new users find inherent support only for singleton TCs confusing. They feel that since the IDE generates only singleton code, then only singleton code is correct. Even if they know how to change it for themselves, they are loathe to do so because they think it might cause other problems. It would be nice (and likely simple) to provide a checkbox in the wizard to ask whether a singleton component is desired. Depending on the selection, the wizard would generate singelton TC code or non-singleton code.
Possible. There is not that much to generate for a non-singleton TC; clearly you have to have a class extending TopComponent, but there is not a lot else that the template could clearly fill in for you. You will need to have some criterion for when to create or open the TC (a Window menu action will not make sense in this case). You need to decide whether it should be clonable, and implement that if desired. You need to specify how persistence should work. Etc.