Swing getHeight() value changing from 0 to 16?

It is a side effect from not creating/modifying your Swing components on the EDT. Now the EDT is busy doing the layout while you are adding components in another thread.

I'm not sure why this is happening but may be because the addition of the component maybe on a background thread and might not have been updated till the next statement is called and its updated a few millisecs later and appears when you call it second time.

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