Blocking application input without a modal dialog

Hi,
Is it possible to block all input to a Swing application while still having the EDT running? I'd want the effect of opening a modal dialog without showing the dialog itself. This is required in order to wait for a SwingWorker thread to execute.
The API documentation of SwingWorker.get() states that "When you want the SwingWorker to block on the Event Dispatch Thread we recommend that you use a modal dialog." However, I'm using a ProgressMonitor to monitor the progress of the worker which opens its own dialogs, so I don't want any other extra dialogs popping up. If the EDT simply waits for the worker, the ProgressMonitor dialog pops up but does not paint itself.
I guess it might be possible to open an modal dialog that is invisible, but it probably can't be guaranteed to be invisible in all environments and not to show up in window lists.
Is this possible using the normal API, or do I need to duplicate the functionality of ProgressMonitor using an always-open modal dialog (which would seem like quite a waste of code)?
Also, is there any method that could be called at intervals and which would handle any pending EDT events? I've seen this in some other toolkits (for example GTK+), and it would simplify working in the EDT a lot.

Thanks for the comments. Especially the page about the disabled glass pane summarized both methods well.
However, my application may have sevelar application panes and dialogs open that modify the document. Disabling and re-enabling all of them manually would be quite a hassle. Unless somebody can give instructions on replicating the disabling effect of a modal dialog, I guess there are two possibilities left:
1. Using a modal dialog that opens always, even for short tasks.
2. Re-implementing the functionality of ProgressMonitor and blocking the EDT for the 0.5 - 1 seconds while it evaluates whether the task is long enough to open the dialog or not.

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I have an application where all dialogs are modal. Clicking on a button opens another dialog box. If I click very quickly three four times, two three dialog box of the same type are opened.
How to avoid this situation.
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>
Java is a little slow with mouse events.Java isn't slow with mouse events, the fact that he's getting multiple dialogs shows this. The real problem is that you need to maintain state of your gui and not let the user do things that you know shouldn't happen. You can't depend on modal dialogs to block all user input. Nor can you depend on the event thread to process events quickly.
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Regards
cj

I know what causes that - there's an API in the IDE called "WaitCursor" that blocks interaction with the UI while an operation is happening in the background. It's usually employed in cases where an operation is short enough not to require a progress dialog, but long enough that if it just happened on the UI thread, it would look like the product hung for a few seconds. What you're observing (keyboard keeps working, but mouse just produces beeps) is consistent with the behavior of this API. Something in SQL Developer or the base IDE probably forgot to, or took a very long time to, hide the wait cursor after a background operation.
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Blocking application input without a modal dialog

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