How to prevent a window from activating?

[shollen]

I'm building an on-screen keyboard and am at a loss as to how to keep my keyboard from activating when I click its buttons.

I'm using an instance of NSPanel with "hide on deactivation" disabled in IB. My test button is an NSButton that activates a sendText method full of eventTaps stuff. The method issues the panel a "setBecomesKeyOnlyIfNeeded:YES" message as well (I also tried putting it in "awakeFromNib). The keyboard window still comes to the front when I click the test button. What am I missing???

Thanks!