Force Focus in Tkinter

[annagel]

I am looking for a way to force a Tkinter window into focus on a system
level.  I know the force focus method should bring one window of my
application into focus, but it seems I need to have some part of my
application already in focus on a system level to make this work.  If
for example I am entering text at the command line and call a
force_focus on my root window the call will not return till I click on
a window in my application.  The same goes for any modification to the
main window I have tried adding new windows (toplevel), setting focus,
generating events, none of these calls returns until I move focus over
to my parrent window.  Is there any way around this?  Basically any way
to create a kind of panic dialog that jumps up over what the user is
doing at the command line.