Thanks so much Samuel Thibault - I have been trying to get netbeans to start properly on my machine since yesterday before coming to this bug via jstack inspection. With recent updates to Ubuntu both openjdk-8 and openjdk-7 caused netbeans to freeze within the first 30 seconds of starting. This only happened over local X so I was working around the problem with ssh tunneling which had its own problems. Commenting out the assistive.technologies line solved the problem for me. Sorry, I know at least the former of these isn't a Debian version number but both 7u91-2.6.3-0ubuntu0.1 and 8u66-b17-1 were affected for me. I have libatk 2.16.0-2build1 installed although I believe I have all universal access controls switched off.
