I want to pop a message up to the user and have the program continue on. Therefore, I created a modeless dialog. However, when executing the program (an applet) in internet explorer the textarea object for the message is not rendered. Instead, I get a transparent background. The frame of the dialog is there but the contents are not. If I make the dialog modal, the textarea is rendered but then I cannot continue execution of the invoking class. How do I get rid of the transparent background? I tried txtArea.setVisible(true) and other things. This seems to be another ie annoyance.