Try the idea I wrote in the oringinal post, and added javascript to handle both onkeypress and onkeydown events. Worked perfectly.
What I couldn't do is: with Firefox, if you click on the textbox area, it also brings up the file dialog, I would like IE to mimic that. I tried two things, none worked:
- added onclick event handler, that does not nothing, I guess IE only treat a click on the browse button as a true click for the uploader, but not if you click the textbox area;
- added onfocus event handler, that worked... however the onfocus can easily be triigered when I didn't expect - didn't like that.