I can't start a new project on Netbeans

Just posted the same question here ... the solution for me was to downgrade OpenJDK from 6b27 to 6b24 (look at the link for details).

My NetBeans was looking excactly like in your sreenshot and also had some other strange problems.

I would suggest you do java -version if this shows that you have 6b27 installed and cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep openjdk shows that you recently received the OpenJDK update you can try to fix the problem reverting to 6b24 using this command:

apt-get install openjdk-6-jre=6b24-1.11.1-4ubuntu2 openjdk-6-jre-headless=6b24-1.11.1-4ubuntu2 icedtea-6-jre-cacao=6b24-1.11.1-4ubuntu2

****edit****

As I discovered some other problems (SSH connection wouldn't establish within NetBeans) I finally took the step to upgrade to Oracle JDK7. To start NetBeans with another JDK you have got to edit ./netbeans-7.X/etc/netbeans.conf and change the line netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre" (I guess this gets generated in the NetBeans installation process). Otherwise it will still use your old JDK no matter what java -version says.

It's a bug caused by the JDK version used:

This problem is JDK bug with focus (never ending loop when requesting focus). Issue filed against JDK is http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6598089. (IcedTea and in future OpenJDK will be distributed as default JDK for Linux distribution so it should be supported.)

The bug seems to affect both Oracle JDK and OpenJDK. Update your JDK in order to fix it. (Don't forget to chante the netbeans_jdkhome variable in the ./netbeans-7.X/etc/netbeans.conf file!)