[quote user="Loren"]I guess the send user message function also triggers a dialog redraw[/quote]
That function does nothing other than to send the message to your dialog hook function. It's up to you to put some code in the DIALOG_MESSAGE_USER case that does whatever you want.
There's a similar function mdlDialog_hookItemSendUserMsg() that sends a user message to a specific dialog item, if you prefer to handle things that way.