We've explained the dialogue process a number of times here before you should be able to find the threads if you search the forums. The short explanation is that the dialogue process is used to bring up message boxes without interrupting the normal operation of other desk functions. It doesn't usually clean up after itself nicely and shows up as not responding on the process list even though it has exited cleanly. This is purely cosmetic and doesn't affect console functionality.
What do you mean that the effects button is going nuts? Are you referring to the event monitor? It's functioning normally on all of my consoles here and we haven't made any changes to that code recently.
