JScrollPane too lazy to update...

Question

I have a textpanel with some JScrollPane attached. The text is written, and scrolling automatically, and all is well.
However: My program is doing very computing intense tasks and can be busy in one method for maybe 10 minutes at a time, and during execution the log will not be updated so the user will have no idea of what is going on until the program finishes and the JScrollPane finally bothers to update.
I have tried all kinds of things to force an update, but only the text is updating, scrolling is not. I do not want to mess around with threads, it must be a simple way to force an update of the scrollbars?
Any ideas???
    public class TextOutputPanel extends JPanel
      // A Swing textarea for display of string info
      JTextArea textArea = null;
      public TextOutputPanel()
        setLayout(new BorderLayout());
        // Create an instance of JTextArea
        textArea = new JTextArea();
        textArea.setEditable(false);
        // Add to a scroll pane so that a long list of
        // computations can be seen.
        JScrollPane areaScrollPane = new JScrollPane(textArea);
        add(areaScrollPane,"Center");
        public void clear()
            textArea.setText("");
        public void println(String str)
          textArea.append(str + "\n");
          textArea.setCaretPosition(textArea.getDocument().getLength());
//Trying all kinds of weird things here to force an update, but nada :(
            textArea.revalidate();
          this.revalidate();
          this.update(this.getGraphics());
        public void print(String str)
          textArea.append(str);
            this.revalidate();
            this.update(this.getGraphics());
    }

Answer 1

I do not want to mess around with threadsWhy? You will never learn to develop responsive GUI's
if you don't. Here is a simple example:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=57&threa
dID=437592
a simple way to force an update of the scrollbars?Typically you can cause scrolling by using:
textArea.setCaretPosition(
textArea.getDocument().getLength() );
but this may not work because I think it adds code to
the end of the Event Thread which is currently
executing your long running task.
Note in my code above I have already included this. It scrolls fine, but does not update the scrolling until my program is finished running, which is way too late, my user will have died a natural death by then.
I can force update of almost any swing component with update, ro similar, but it does not work with scrolling :(