I figured it out. “rows” cannot be defined in the JSON of there are no rows. So, even if “rows”: [] this won't work. You have to NOT have rows defined in the json.

I changed this:

{”rows”:[],”page”:1.0,”total”:1.0,”records”:0.0}

to this:

{”page”:1.0,”total”:1.0,”records”:0.0}

I also found that updating my jqGrid version to the latest release (I was one version behind) eliminated some of the issues I was having with resizing empty grids.