BestJewSinceJC 700 Posting Maven

I'm using netbeans and I have a problem. I'm using a card layout to flip between multiple windows. Two of these windows are wider than the others, and this cannot really be helped. Ideally, it would be best to design each window so that they are all the same size, but it is impossible in this case, due to the types of information. Anyway, I can't figure out how to make them resize themselves at runtime based on which window is selected. I have the following hierarchy:

JFrame
JTabbedPane
JPanel 1 (as one of the tabs, this JPanel contains the card layout)
JPanel 2 (this is inside JPanel 1, and contains the combo box which decides what window to flip to)
JPanel (this is inside JPanel 1, and contains the windows that are flipped between)


I've tried explicitly setting the size, starting with the topmost component (the JFrame), then resizing each of the things underneath. No luck, it just ignores me and does not change the size of anything except the JFrame.

Edit:

Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do. Since the top level container is the only thing stopping the lower ones from resizing, resizing from the top down should be working. So I guess it's the layout manager which is stopping things from being resized. Hm.