One particular one of importance changed the behavior of the beanbox (because of one word in one class!).

If you tried to run the Beanbox and did not get any buttons, you need to edit a bit.

See http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/faq/faq.help.html#Q11 ( or local) about how you need to change the ExplicitButtonBeanInfo class at <BDK_INSTALL_DIR>demo\sunw\demo\buttons\ExplicitButtonBeanInfo.java

In these notes it says, "and recompile the class". This is not as easy as it seems at first - you need to remember a few things.

When you try to simpy recompile, of course you find out that the class depends and uses all kinds of other classes.
So you need to go to the jars file <BDK_INSTALL_DIR>jars\buttons.jar and (I copied the buttons.jar into a temp directory for this) open the jar (jar -xvf) remember that the classes are all in a package sunw.demo.buttons , so put the new file there and then go back up the directories to the same dir that sunw is in.
compile with
javac sunw/demo/buttons/ExplicitButtonBeanInfo.java

Remake the .jar file
jar cfmv buttons.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF sunw

all of the CoreJava beans are available here but as they are jars, be careful (i.e. check them) downloading from the web to a PC since it may get corrupted. (I wonder if Microsoft fixed that)

I put the new buttons.jar here (as buttons.zip) in case you are lazy.
Actually, I redid the zip so the current bdk1_1.zip file should work fine

Also for 1.4 java or higher, also note the JavaBeans Component Architecture is advertising a new BeanBuilder tool which "will replace the BeanBox." Since there have become a number of IDEs that you can work with beans in, I am sticking with the BeanBox