Sony Ericsson's emulators completely borked?

Recently we have been working on an existing mobile application for one of our clients, mobiguide. The original app, which we completed, was written for the cldc 1.1 and midp 2.0 api. We got reports that there where problems with the Sony Ericsson P900/P990 phones.

Our search showed that the api supported by the P900 was cldc1.0 only. Our first step was to download the emulator from the Sony Ericsson developer site and run the application in it. Almost immediately there were strange exceptions being thrown.

java.lang.StackOverflowError
at com.sun.kvem.ScreenImpl.updateComponent(ScreenImpl.java:491)
at com.sun.kvem.ScreenImpl.access$100(ScreenImpl.java:33)
at com.sun.kvem.ScreenImpl$DefaultDisplayUpdatePolicy.updateFace(ScreenImpl.java:599)
at com.sun.kvem.ScreenImpl.updateFace(ScreenImpl.java:463)

This was a real head scratcher why was the application throwing these errors. It didn't relate to missing apis. We searched the Sony Ericsson site but no one else seemed to have this problem. What we did find referred to repaint methods being called in a paint method but we had no such code. After about a day of complete confusion we did what we should have done in the first place and wrote a simple test application. The result was the same errors. Clearly the emulator was borked to the point of being useless. What is strange is that no-one seems to have reported this as an issue. Google revealed no search results which explained this.

I hope this quick blog save some other developer from wasted time.