Java Suspect Memory Leak in Swing Components

Question

I have an out of memory exception when working with javax.Swing and here's what I did. I loaded 16 jpgs (70*70 pixels each) and had 16 Jbuttons. I set the ImageIcon of the JButtons to different jpgs very quickly in a loop, basically as quickly as my CPU can handle . The memory usage is increased radically. The problem is, I never reloaded image. There are only 16 images and all the assignments are passed by reference right? I run Eclipse Memory Analyzer and here's what I got:

One instance of "java.awt.image.FilteredImageSource" loaded by " &lt system class loader &gt " occupies 703,066,368 (43.58%) bytes. The instance is referenced by sun.awt.image.ToolkitImage @ 0x7859cef60 , loaded by " &lt system class loader &gt ". The memory is accumulated in one instance of "java.util.Hashtable$Entry[]" loaded by "&lt system class loader &gt".

Keywords java.awt.image.FilteredImageSource
java.util.Hashtable$Entry[]

Can I suspect there's a memory leak in Java's swing implementation? Any ideas?

Basically the code looks like:

    public class Test{
        private static ImageIcon[] imgIcon;
        private static JButton[] buttons;
        private static JFrame myFrame;
        public static void main(String[] args){
            myFrame = new JFrame(new GridLayout());
            for(int i = 0; i &lt 16; i ++){
                 imgIcon[i] = //load the imageIcons
                 buttons[i] = new JButton();
                 myFrame.add(buttons[i]);
            }
            myFrame.pack();
            myFrame.setVisible(true);
            new Thread(new Runnable(){
                @Override
                public void run(){
                    while(true){
                         for(int i = 0; i &lt 16; i ++){
                               SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait(new Runnable(){
                                       public void run(){
                                            buttons[i].setIcon(imgIcon[/*random num 1-16*/]);
                                       });
                         }
                     }
                    }
            }).start();
         }
    }

Please disregard the apparent anti-pattern here because I abstracted away a lot of things going on in the new thread.