Thanks for the ideas Sephiroth and Zone-MR. After looking into the matter a little bit more (alright, a lot more
)... I ended up going the route you mentioned Zone-MR.
I've learned that it is not possible to pop a layer over an entire frameset being each frame is considered it's own page... The the entire window is then not treated as a whole.
So to accomplish this, I set up an iframe that calls in the page that sets up the frameset. This way I can set up and call the layer within the page that has the iframe (ilayer for NS) in it.
This works well in IE... NS, well, still working on that...
Thanks for the help guys!
-SlickVic78