I am not sure if windows has this ability, but I noticed while watching a heathenx screencast he was able to have the align dialog where he could minimize it, and I could see the buttons for minize, maximize and close, is there a setting in inkscape to make this happen using windows

the technique that i was using to roll up my dialog box was compiz/beryl. in kde this roll up is called shading. double-clicking the title bar will roll up and roll down the dialog.

a few years ago i used to use a program called actual windows. it has this same "roll up" feature that you are looking for. http://www.actualtools.com/

Oh, I see I thought my version was malfunctioning or something. Nice little gadget.

Edit: Whoa nelly I just discovered that my little app called dexpot allows me to create a rule to do just this very little thing.