VB/XP demands "attention" on TaskBar. How to stop?

[Austin Hastings]

Windows (XP) makes the taskbar label for an inactive process that has popped up a dialog box change color and blink.

For example, if an editor throws up a "save as" dialog box because an unnamed buffer wants to autosave, the [Editor - *New Buffer*] taskbar entry on my normally-blue windows taskbar will start blinking orange.

In addition, my taskbar is set to auto-hide + always-on-top, and entering "blinking attention-whore mode" causes the taskbar to NOT hide anymore and be on top of everything else.

For reasons that are not clear to me, VB (running Ubuntu Guest) sporadically goes into this mode despite not having thrown up a dialog box. (It wouldn't be an ubuntu d-box, it would be a vbox machine box under windows xp.) That causes the taskbar to pop up, preventing me from accessing some important bits of screen real estate. This is doubly annoying because there's nothing in the VB windows that actually needs my attention. I want to ignore it, but can't because of the lost screen space (and what's under it).

Does anybody know what causes VB to go into blinking-attention-whore-mode, and better yet how to get it to NOT go there any more?

Thanks,

=Austin