please help disabling spinbutton arrows

[Neil Zanella <nzanella gmail com>]

Hello,

I need to temporarily disable spinbutton arrows so that the user can
still cut text from the
spinbutton contents and paste it elsewhere, but cannot change it in
any way. In particular
the arrows need to be disabled without disabling the entire widget.
This makes sense for
the following reason: the disabling is temporary: the user presses a
button which disables
it in order for a particular operation to complete in a way that makes
sense, an then another
button click elsewhere reenables editing the numbers using the spin
button arrows.

So, how do I temporarily disable the spin button arrows so that they
become grayed out
but without the text entry box being grayed out? I want the spin
button arrows to be
disabled, and the user to still be able to cut text from the white
space for text entry.
How do I do this?

Thanks,

Neil