Can't establish absolute dimensions and positioning for JPanel in CardLayout and their associated components in Netbeans 7

I have a few JPanels stacked under a mainPanel via CardLayout under Netbeans 7. Now for some weird reason I can't get any of these JPanels to maintain a setPreferredSize of [600,400] and most annoyingly I can't get the associated components to be placed right on where they're supposed to be positioned on their associated JPanel. Please note that I'm using Netbeans 7 properties menu to set these parameters. I even have set u开发者_C百科p the minimum and maximum size parameters.