Firefox onmousedown focus/blur

[atn2002]

I'm trying to create a control which when the mouse button gets pressed

on one div an absolute positioned div pops up in place of the cursor.

From there the cursor should interact with the dialog before the mouse

button is released. In other words one element will catch onmousedown,

display the popup, and the popup element will catch onmouseup. This
works fine in IE as the popup automatically accepts following events,
but my problem is in Firefox. In Firefox everything behind the popup
still
receive events even though they can't be seen (hidden by the popup).
I have to release the mouse button and then click on the popup again
before it accepts the onmouseup event. I also used a different cursor
on the popup to see if Firefox recognized it was there at all.
Still the cursor doesn't change until I release the mouse button and
move
the cursor across the popup element.

I've tried focus/blur, timeout delays, hiding the first element
(the one which receives onmousedown) but nothing works.
The only thing that works is hiding the entire body and then
using setTimeout to show the entire body again 1ms later.
Obviously though that is very ugly. Any other ideas...please!?!?!?!