I wouldn't recommend trying to go down this road. You might run into other problems in the future. Also, your users might find it difficult to find floating panes if they are behind the main form because they do not show in the task bar. That being said, it would be easier to modify the Form hosting the floating panes by using a derived UltraDockManager and overriding InitializeFloatingWindowContainer (this method was only added to versions 8.1 and later in a recent hotfix, so if it is not available, you will have to download the latest hotfix). The floating window is passed into the method.

i want floating windows not to appear on top of the form they were floated from.  In case anyone cares i've hacked around it by clearing out the owner property of the parent form when the control is floating like this :

               Form f = FindForm();
               if (f != null)
               {
                  f.Owner = null;
               }

i'm sure this will come back to haunt me somehow. I've also played around with showing the real form caption and removing the floating panel caption so it looks like a real window. Goofy stuff like this:

                  f.FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.Sizable;
                  f.ControlBox = true;
                  f.MaximizeBox = true;
                  f.MinimizeBox = true;
                  f.SizeGripStyle = SizeGripStyle.Show;
                  DockMananger.SetCaptionVisible(this, false);

Bill