Hi Greg,

I was triggering it with just:

Userform1.Show

I was unaware of the vbModeless option until now. (Or perhaps you meant in more detail what leads to the triggering of the userform?)

It doesn't really matter if the userform has focus or not as long as the end result is that the user can keep typing without interruption. So you're right that my method didn't return the focus to the document. Instead it captured the last keystroke and both used it to close the userform and returned it to the document. The end result was that the user would see the popup for a moment without having to do anything to close it.

It's interesting that your KeyPress suggestion doesn't give me the issue with the wonky ascii codes that KeyDown does. I wonder what's working differently there. But regardless, the vbModeless suggestion does what I want better than I thought it could be done. Ideally I'd like a transparent animation to pop up, but it seems such things are impossible in the context of VBA.