I have a JTable which, when the appropriate button is clicked, begins to fill with the results of a file tree walk that goes on in the background. This works fine.
I
Your code has a big problem that may explain what you observe: you are modifying your table model outside the EDT, which is evil.
Since you are using a SwingWorker, you should try to use it completely correctly, e.g. use its publish API to call model.addRow().
SwingWorker
publish
model.addRow()