strangely that seems to work. i don't quite get how this is different from .*, but nevermeind. now the thing is giving me some grief about unhandled exceptions, but i'll figure that out.

"*" makes all the classes of a package visible but it doesn't apply for subpackages.
So you would need to import both,  javax.imageio.* and javax.imageio.stream.*

i see. that is rather unexpected behaviour. i haven't touched native java in forever, so thanks again.