I have a JDialog panel, that pops up before the program starts some
long calculations. In the Dialog, the user has the option to abort the
calculations, if he doesn't have the patience to wait. Problem is,
while the he dialog window pops up in time, its content (cancel
button) doesn't get drawn until after the computer is done with the
calculations.

I've made the JDialog a thread, and the thread.join() command forces
the program to wait until that thread is fihished. It seems that this
all works. Even so, the content of the JDialog doesn't appear until
much later (too late). Despite pack() and show() commands in the
Dialog code.

Any ideas, how I can force the jdialog-content to be drawn
immediately? Someone else has posted this problem before, but I didn't
really understand the answers there, also, one of the suggestions was
using threads, which is just what I'm doing.

thanks for your help!