My opinion about JFileChooser, I have mostly used the
Java SDK 1.3 standalone and with Borland JBuilder IDE.
What is fun by the way is that JBuilder, written in
Java uses the JFiulChooser class, performing very
poorly everytime i want to open up a (java) file. When
it's first installed it works (JBuilder), then it
won't display anything, as you point out, no folders,
no files, but you can still manyally enter the
filepath in the little textField, or whatever it is.

My advice (though I'm still not  that advanced as a lot
of you out there) is to use FileHander (from the AWT
class set). It's a bit smaller and looks more
Windows-like, probably better on the Mac as well,
where I have heard from at least on Mac entusiast that
JFileChooser looks awful.

There is some exceptions to catch in FileHandler
though, if you try to read a "" file  for example.