Firefox OnMouseDown blur/focus

[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 I have to release the mouse
button and then click on the popup again before it accepts the
onmouseup event. Everything behind the popup still receive events even
though they can't be seen (hidden by the popup). 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.

I've tried 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!?!?!?!