Hiding modal dialogs

[John J Lee <jjl pobox com>]

Is it possible to hide and re-show modal dialogs?

Trying this in a tiny app, calling gtk_widget_hide_all() or setting the 
visible property true on a running modal dialog caused its main loop to 
quit.

I no longer intend to try to do this in real code -- I'm just curious re 
whether its possible, and why.  The original use case involved hiding all 
dialogs using a generic function that doesn't know about specific dialogs.

Is there a way to hide a modal dialog without quitting its event loop?

Thanks


John