A 10 year old null pointer bug

I was doing some historical analysis of FindBugs warnings in the JDK, and found that there is one null pointer warning that FindBugs generates on the 1.0.2 version of Sun's JDK that still exists in JDK 1.6.0-b99.
The bug is that if you call setHelpMenu(null) on a java.awt.MenuBar, and there is already an existing help menu, you'll get a null pointer exception. The buggy code is:

   /**
     * Sets the specified menu to be this menu bar's help menu.
     * If this menu bar has an existing help menu, the old help menu is
     * removed from the menu bar, and replaced with the specified menu.
     * @param m    the menu to be set as the help menu
     */
    public void setHelpMenu(Menu m) {
        synchronized (getTreeLock()) {
            if (helpMenu == m) {
                return;
            }
            if (helpMenu != null) {
                remove(helpMenu);
            }
            if (m.parent != this) {
                add(m);
            }
            helpMenu = m;
            if (m != null) {
                m.isHelpMenu = true;
                m.parent = this;
                MenuBarPeer peer = (MenuBarPeer)this.peer;
                if (peer != null) {
                    if (m.peer == null) {
                        m.addNotify();
                    }
                    peer.addHelpMenu(m);
                }
            }
        }
    }

Now, the JavaDoc doesn't say that you should call setHelpMenu(null) to remove a help menu. But there is no other way to remove a help menu, and the check for if (m != null) suggests that the developer anticipated m being null. But we know that m can't be null here, because if m were null, a null pointer exception would have occurred at if (m.parent != this)

Why hasn't this been noticed or fixed in the past 10 years? I don't know, but I've now filed a bug report.