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This could prevent at least one deadlock - see issue 168109 and the attached thread dump http://www.netbeans.org/nonav/issues/showattachment.cgi/84438/threaddump-fixed.txt If DialogDisplayer.getDefault() is showing a modal dialog, there is no reason to update the current activated nodes or selection context until that dialog is closed. This would probably improve performance of showing dialogs a bit, and it is certainly unnecessary work since the user has no access to main-menu or toolbar actions while a modal dialog is open. Could be solved either by delaying any selection context changes until a modal dialog is closed, or by firing a change to Lookup.EMPTY for selection context and Node[0] when a modal dialog is shown - either one would prevent Actions from trying to do expensive work (in the thread dump above, look up the owning project of some files on the clipboard) when the actions cannot possibly be really used.
the scenario in bug #168109 seems valid to me - the refactoring dialog makes some changes so the activated nodes should change to reflect those changes in the IDE...
Changing to enhancement then. It is still unnecessary overhead for most dialogs; ideally no change would be the default for most dialogs, and let the dialog displayer provide some hint for the case that the dialog actually needs this behavior.