Help With JScrollPane and many JLabels...

Question

I am in the process of designing an 'image browser' applet for a client, but am having some difficulty in deciding how I can most elegantly meet all of the requirements. The specification calls for an applet that can view up to 400 images (all images are small - 120 * 120 px), the view of the images can be scrolled (if not all are in the view) or scaled (zoom in and out on any area), and the images will need to 'animate' or move to new locations as sorting criteria changes. Also, I need to be able to group images into arbitrary n*n arrays and click on any image in the view (rollovers may also be necessary in the future).
At first, I thought this would be easily solved by putting the images (JLabels?) into as many groups (JPanels?) as necessary to meet the sort criteria, then adding the groups to my main view (JScrollPane w/JPanel) in a GridLayout. My current attempt at a solution scales the groups (JPanels) via. an overridden paintComponent method from within my main scrolling view (using g2d and scale). Unfortunately, I now have many problems that I am having trouble solving:
1. After I re-scale the JScrollPane (zoom in or out) and then try and scroll, the new images that scroll in are either garbled or just junk (seems like remnants of the original, non-scaled components?).
2. The scrollbars, at first, were not reflecting the current scaling and how much content is visible, so I overrode the getPreferredSize method in my JScrollPane content object to return (super.getPreferredSize * scaleFactor) - this fixes the appearance of the scroll bars (ie. they accurately reflect how much content there is), but it also offsets all of the images left depending on the scale value (less scale -> images offset further left).
3. I need pixel-perfect control over the images, so that I can animate the transition from one 'group' to another - I can't see a way to achieve this with my current solution.
Has anyone tried to do something like this before? What is a good way of accomplishing what I need here? Any code out there that does something similar? Any help would be appreciated, I've been banging my head against the wall over this for days now...
Thanks in advance,
Mike P.
Here is some relevant code:
/* From BrowserPanel (JPanel associated with my main JScrollPane) */
public void paint (Graphics g) {
    Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) g;
    g2d.scale(scaleFactor, scaleFactor);
    super.paint(g2d);
/* From BrowserPanel (JPanel associated with my main JScrollPane) */
public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
    Dimension origSize = super.getPreferredSize();
    double originalSizeX;
    double originalSizeY;
    originalSizeX = origSize.getWidth();
    originalSizeY = origSize.getHeight();
    double newSizeX = originalSizeX * scaleFactor;
    double newSizeY = originalSizeY * scaleFactor;
    String strX = Double.toString(newSizeX);
    String strY = Double.toString(newSizeY);
    /* Round the string (discard anything after the decimal) */
    strX = strX.substring(0, strX.indexOf("."));
    strY = strY.substring(0, strY.indexOf("."));
    /* Convert string to int... */     
    int x = Integer.parseInt(strX);
    int y = Integer.parseInt(strY);
    return new Dimension(x, y);
}

Answer 1

I increased the frame size to 3 lines and noticed the the flickering is a result of the text area painting itself without the scrollbar and then repainting itself with the scrollbar. I don't know why this happens, but a work around is to use:
ScrollPaneConstants.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS,