Problems Refreshing with JPanels

Question

I currently have a simple app that has four buttons along the bottom, and a JPanel on top (lets call this panel the parentPanel). The JPanel only has a border around it, and another JPanel inside it (lets call this inner one the childPanel). Depending on which of the four buttons are pressed, the the childPanel should change (i.e. its changed to a completely different panel, with different content).
However, the panels are not being repainted properly. If I simply change the panel (i.e. in the parentPanel, I call remove(childPanel), then childPanel = someOtherPanel, and finally add(childPanel), the screen wont show the changes until I resize the window. I've tried calling things such as invalidate and validate, revalidate, doLayout, repaint, and all of these do the same thing: it paints the new panel OVER the old one. i.e. the old content remains, and the new content is painted overtop so that you can see the old still where the new didnt overlap.
I tried also using setVisible to false, and back to true, and this works fine, but I'm also sure there should be a proper way of doing this (after looking at the setVisible code, I realized this works because swing draws a rectangle over the space when set to false, which would effectively erase the old content).
I also saw this thread which seems to be related, but nobody found a solution there either: http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=305694&messageID=1219759
any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

I think I've got the problem solved. Immediately after doing the add and remove, I called revalidate, and then repaint, and this seemed to fix it (as opposed to validate and repaint). Not really sure why this works, but oh well.
Also, cardlayout isnt an option (i'm trying to make an installer program that will be usable in swing and can also be used with charva, which is a library that allows swing-based apps to be rendered in ASCII for a command prompt, and that does not have the cardLayout available).
Message was edited by:
DeepanT
scratch that, validate OR revalidate works. I guess im just stupid:P