This is true and is a method I have employed in the past. The trickiest aspect of doing it this way is making the Panel modal so that the form behind it cannot be clicked untill the dialog is closed. In my case this wasn't too tricky as the entire page worked on GDI and clickable regions, rather than using standard System.Windows.Forms controls. Because of this I could solve this problem by temporarily unhooking the click events of the form. If somebody has a solution for achieving a truly modal panel, I'd certainly be interested to hear their ideas.