Although somewhat weird at a first glance, LESSTIF even installs a (non-exclusive) grab on the shells of modeless dialogs - see grab entry #3 in figure .
The reason for this is that from LESSTIF's point of view the dialogs and their grabs don't form a cascade. Thus, if you pop up a modeless dialog whenever a full application modal dialog is already active, the new dialog should receive user input too - even if the modeless dialog is created as a child of the other dialog's parent and not as a child of the full application modal dialog.