Just a quickie...

I am using a portal to display a single field of related data as a visual cue only. Actually, I'm using a portal to show/hide a set of buttons for performing an operation - it only shows up when I set a flag. The problem is, if the user clicks near the buttons but not on them, the portal that they are sitting in gets selected, and this big area of the screen turns black.

Is there a way I can keep portals from being selected like that when a user clicks on them?

What color is your background? Try a light gray backgound. You will still get some change of color but not black. Make your portal as small as posible. Maybe just big enough to hold a single button.

Another way is to cover all the rest of the portal row with transparent buttons that performs an Exit Record/Request. The problem with this though is that the user gets dropped out of the record and their portal row gets lost: frustrating if they've spent a while scrolling to find it.

For me, a selected portal row is a lesser evil than the user losing thewir selected portal row.