I find myself typing along when all of a sudden a dialog box pops up.  I am not
able to stop typing before it focuses and in some cases I hit a hot key and the
dialog box vanishes, off to do I know not what.

I think a delay after displaying the new window and before giving keyboard focus
to the new window or dialog box would help with this problem.  Perhaps a 1
second default?

Another idea to solve this problem would be to wait to focus X seconds after the
last keyboard event, to make sure the user isn't in the middle of typing.