Problem with non-modal children of modal dialogs

[Phillip & Suzanne David <pdavid(at)earthling.net>]

Hi all;

I remember this issue being discussed shortly after IDL 5.0 came out,
but not noticing that this affected me at the time.  However, in some of
my programs, I display moderately complicated (modal) dialogs, and want
to provide a help capability for these.  The problem I have using IDL is
that if I display the help in a different window, IDL requires that
window to be modal as well.  Thus, when the user actually desires to use
the information in the help window, s/he must first close the window
(remembering the help tip) and act on the help information.  There
appears to be no way to make the window stay up while allowing the user
to switch back to the modal dialog.  My solution so far has been to
stick with the IDL 4.0 convention to XManager that allows non-modal
children of modal dialogs (although there appears to be no way to close
them except by closing the modal dialog).  Does anyone know of a better
way to handle this?

Thanks.

Phillip