Hard time with hardware acceleration.

[SMcNeill]

This demonstrated the "1"produces another hardware image, which correctly overlays the original. So one solution would be to convert my popup to a hardware image and display it that way. I'm not sure if that is what you are getting at...

That's exactly the idea I was talking about.  Make it another hardware image and place them on different hardware layers.  You have 2 hardware layers to work with and you can put stuff on them just by adding that ,1 to the end of the putimage statement with a hardware image.