Moving a modal window's parent window in Win 7

Question

One of my biggest frustrations with Windows comes about when a program opens a progress bar in a modal window. If I want to move the program's windows to the edge of my workspace so I can keep track of the program's progress while working on something else, I can relocate the modal window to another part of the screen, but it's parent window is immovable. Sometimes there's stuff in the parent window I'd like to keep an eye on too. Is there any way I can alter win 7's modal window behavior so that the parent windows can be moved and resized? (I'm aware that I can right-click the taskbar and let Windows re-arrange windows for me, but that level of control is often inadequate.)

Answer 1

The program AltDrag ( https://code.google.com/p/altdrag/ ) successfully moves and resizes windows (Using Alt+Left click and Alt+Right click, respectively).

Answer 2

This is impossible.

By it's very definition, a modal window is a child window that requires the user to interact with it before the program continues.

Technically, under Win32, a modal window's parent is disabled. This is actually a handy way to tell if a target window is modal by testing to see if its parent window is disabled. Basically, in order to allow this, you would basically have to alter the OS itself. And the modal window is a very very old part of the OS.

Plus it introduces unpredictable and unknown bugs into the program. If a program forces you to create a profile, but you decide "Screw this!! I don't want to give you my information." Then you click on a toolbar button in the parent window that then pulls settings from the profile. What?? The profile returned null?? Crash.

Modal windows are sometimes decided very early into the development process.

Perhaps you should petition the vendor to alter the program.