[hrbuckley]

Are you developing with the JDE or Eclipse?

I don't understand why execution is not stopping at break point 1, but obviously it is getting there, and var == 0 or the code with break point 2 would not be executed.

On reason could be that break point 1 would be executed on one thread, and break point 2 would be executed on a different thread, the event thread. If break points are somehow disabled for the thread that is executing the code a break point 1 then you would get the behaviour you are seeing.