Nathan, >From what I've seen I'm afraid this is the way it is. If you call an instance of tkMessageBox and you don't have a 'master' Tk instance running, it will create its own.
Still, I'm sure with a bit of voodoo you can hide the self created tk window while showing the message box. If you find a more elegant way to accomplish this, please post back ! Harlin Seritt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list