If you are truly stuck, there's a trick to achieving strokes and shadows in paint without any fancy stuff by drawing the text with the stroke color, then drawing the text again with a different color on top of it.
Usually, for shadows I just draw the text again with an offset of 1 pixel, so:
String msg = "Hello";
int x = 15, y = 15;
g.setColor(Color.BLACK);
drawString(msg, x + 1, y + 1);
g.setColor(Color.RED);
drawString(msg, x, y);
Thats for a basic shadow, however if you want a full stroke (like you mentioned in your thread) you must make additions to the above code so that it draws in every direction, not just + 1, example
drawString(msg, x + 1, y + 1);
drawString(msg, x, y + 1);
drawString(msg, x + 1, y);
however, from the looks of it, its drawing too many strings! So only use this if you are hopeless, it's really not that bad but its better than nothing.