Making components NOT resizable, forcing certain components to be resized

Question

Basic setup -
A maximized JFrame with BorderLayout, a JPanel added to the contentPane in location BorderLayout.WEST, and another container in BorderLayout.EAST (not that it should matter much).
In the JPanel in the western side, I have it set up with a BoxLayout going down along the Y axis, and in order, I have a JPanel (with a few JLabels inside), a JPanel with a JLayeredPane that uses GridLayout, and a blank JPanel to fill up space (remember, the parent frame is maximized).
What happens is that my JPanel with the JLayeredPane gets stretched (and distorted) out to the bottom of the frame, when what I want is that the empty JPanel gets stretched and fills up the empty space.
Is there a way to "lock" the layered pane's size so that it doesn't get stretched? Which layout should I use, or how can I make the JPanel take up the empty space? I suppose I could set the empty panel's preferred height to Integer.MAX_VALUE, but that seems like a rather messy solution.
Also... sometimes when I click on the JLayeredPane (which is a gridlayout of JPanels) and I remove a component from one of the JPanels, the whole layout gets shifted over and really distorted (not stretched, but jumbled). I've narrowed the problem down to something to do with validation/revalidate. Would anyone happen to have an idea of what's going on?
Thanks

Answer 1

I had already tried using glue, but it did nothing so I switched over to the filler JPanel, but that obviously didn't help much, but wonderfully enough, once I set the JPanel with the JLayeredPane to have a FlowLayout instead of a BorderLayout, glue worked!
So, now that that's over with, anyone have any ideas about the validation issues... like how to prevent things from revalidating, etc...?