Hmm, just fired up MYOB - nope almost completely modal. Not that that's a particularly good reference example, but it's easy to use. Can't have multiple invoices all open at once. Tried a few utilities and dev tools...Delphi (excrement, but modeless as you'd want), Codecharge studio (yet another IDE, yep), WinZip (not really - similar I guess to the way Outlook works in that viewing/extraction of multiple files can be achieved, but it's only doing what it's programmed to do), IBConsole (a favourite) - nope, it's modal (it looks modeless, but only allows work on one table at a time, closing another table view window if it happens to be open). Perhaps you mean Microsoft Word or Corel Draw - these are mostly dialog driven for anything outside the current document, such as settings etc - try choosing print then while the dialog is open try creating a new document - uh, uh. All this behaviour is exactly what we provide in our applications. Perhaps I'm writing modeless apps with modal windows - I guess it all depends on the target audience, how they use the apps, and what you define as modal anyway. We allow extra dialogs to be used from anywhere, but don't regard that as being modeless. Ever see a modeless web app? Nope - in fact its real close to the old mainframe style of processing - a great leap...somewhere. It's no sweat to start multiple copies of the app if that's what the user really want to do (like opening multiple firefox or ie sessions to look at the same website), and they'll see totals getting updated as well - not sure why it's useful but I guess it is). Maybe it's IDE's - yep modeless mostly, but we don't develop IDE's, and I personally think they're a mess (except lovely VFP). I think we're possibly on similar tracks - just on different ones with different experiences of what works, what doesn't, what looks nice and what looks nasty.

Enjoyed the feedback, but remain to be convinced.

Anyway, this isn't getting the nasty VFP bug z-order bug fixed, so I'll work around it as usual...