>It was originally done in Fox 2.6 for Dos/Windows using @say screens, and they were stripped out and replaced with VFP 6.0 forms.

Well, the forms can be set to modeless behavior by setting the form windowtype property to 0 - modeless

The trouble begins when you launch a form that is modeless, your code is not going to wait for the modeless form to gather whatever input it is gathering.
Starting a loop to check for this is dangerous and causes all kinds of headaches. However, forms that are not a standard input dialog do not need to be modal.