I'm not blindly coding, I do have reasons for the layout of the program and the dialog. One of the reasons for the dialog is to have a persistent notification that will not go away until the user acknowledges it. For example, if you're looking for updates that happened overnight, you will see the dialog in the morning. In addition, it can show content from the update in a chosen layout rather than a single text bubble.

I also have reasons for the timer configuration, but given your logic on user interaction I have to agree that using a timer on a separate thread / container would make more sense. I do not know how to do that just now but I am researching it because of your suggestion. If you would like to leave an example it would be appreciated.

Why would you set TopMost in code when you can set it in the designer?
Because I didn't know it was in the designer

(Did I mention that I self taught myself VB3 10 years ago and I made the Transition to .Net with no supervision?)