Three tries, huh?  :-)

Without more detail, as in code, this is just speculation.  But I expect
that the use of the showDialog() method is the source of your problem.  
Here's how we've done it in our app.

We have a JColorChooser instance variable in a class.  We populate it
via a constructor the first time we use it, then call the createDialog
method.  This requires that we specify the component that will own the
new dialog it returns, a dialog title, a boolean indicating whether to
make it modal, the JColorChooser variable (which serves as the chooser's
pane), and action listeners for the OK and Cancel buttons.  We've set
the latter null, since we discard the Cancel action, and only provide
one for when the user chooses a color so that we can take appropriate
measures.

HTH.

= Steve =