The author of RFE 981544 would like to get dialogs to stay on screen. So would I. Whether I use none, normal or aggressive in Inkscape preferences/Windows/dialogs on top, they still disappear. I think I know what should happen. They should stay on top-right? Can someone tell me what does happen in linux and how can we make it happen in windows?
I had to disable transient (always-on-top) dialogs on Windows altogether because of weird behavior. Namely, they stay on top OK, and when you minimize the editing window they're minimized with it, but when you try to restore it, only one of the dialogs comes up, and you can't access the editing window unless you close that dialog. I considered this to be a worse problem than the lack of always-on-top behavior so I disabled it. This may be a GTK problem and as such it may be fixed in a next version of GTK, or it may be something different - honestly I haven't looked into it much. Whoever wants to play with it, just remove #ifndef WIN32 around lines 200 to 242 of dialogs/dialog-events.cpp.