"De-coupling" user events

[Mark Erbaugh]

Maybe I haven't completely thought this through, is it possible to have
a dialog that is modal only in relationship to a given frame in a
multi-frame application.

For example, say the user clicks on a 'process' button and the result of
the processing needs to display a message dialog. They way I might do
this is to write the processing code in direct response to the button
click.  This code would not return until the user dismisses the dialog.
However, at this point the event loop is not sending events to other
application frames, so they are 'dead' as far as the user is concerned.

What I'd like to do is have the frame that launched the processing
appear 'dead', but have other application frames still active. Until the
user dismisses the dialog, the frame that launched the process is
'dead', but the user can freely interact with other frames.

Where I see a need for this would be if the dialog asked the user a
question for which the user needed to lookup other information in
another frame of the application.

Thanks,
Mark