Annotation panel becomes sluggish and no content shown when lots of annotation displayed

OSX java 1.7 implementation seems to run out of memory when the logical area requested for internal panels becomes too big. See this in the logs on every vertical scroll movement when displaying large numbers of annotation (e.g. disorder prediction rows for thousands of sequences):
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: can't create offscreen surface

There is a workaround which will (hopefully) end up in one of the next jdk1.7 updates:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7160609