Small screens

No, of course not - but there is the matter of the HID guidelines. If Microsoft has also put out a document strongly recommending against modal dialogs and application developers just ignore it, well, at least they tried right? I've never heard such a thing, but then, I haven't looked for it either.

But I know that the number of modal dialogs I see per week on my Linux desktop can be numbered in the single digits, if at all. The number of times I've needed to find some data in a parent window before answering a question asked in a child window - and been unable to because I can't interact with the parent at all while the child is open... countless on Windows. Regardless of the cause, the effect as a whole is the same.