Thought I'd check back and see if there had been any replys to the post and wow! It got a better response than I thought it would
Having it as part of the current MDI tabs was the initial thought as the images are already there, it would work just as well as a seperate floating window of course. This adds extra clutter, but as you know these windows are optional and so can just be opened if the user finds it useful.
The handle idea is quite nice ... the way I imagained it was as having the equivilent of a title bar (please forgive my awful ascii art effort ):
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EDIT: the message board very kindly cleans up my post and removes the spacing from this box I'll try the code tags and see if that preserves the formatting
EDIT2: now theres too much space lol
most users are familiar with the concept of title bars and would probably thik they could be used for moving/reordering the tabs. As an additional visual cue to seperate the funcationality, when the mouse goes over the image itself a second "view" rectange appears (the first being the current view) which will represent where the main view will switch to when the user clicks.
I hope I explained my thoughts in a relatively clear manor.