Is there a way to call EnableWindow without redrawing?

I have a problem where my entire program wants to redraw as it comes back from processing a modal dialog whose parent is a modeless child dialog of an MDI mainframe. Everything is smooth if I only set the style of the parent window to ~WS_DISABLED which makes the parent live again. However, if there is another modeless dialog open, that dialog becomes orphaned. It seems a lot of other things want to hear from that WM_ENABLE message! And naturally, it seems that part of EnableWindow says redraw.

My other attempt at solving this involved giving the modeless dialog a
GetDesktopWindow() parent, but that was a disaster since the modeless dialog ends up in all sorts of bad places... underneath the app etc.

Am I overlooking something obvious or have I stumbled upon a limitation that there's really no good way around?

Thanks if you want to take a shot at this.. anyone