focusing a spawned application

[problem child]

Hi,

Been looking through python docs and searching the web, but haven't 
found out how to do this.

What I've got so far is a (windowed) client app that connects to a 
server (written in python). Both are running on the same machine. I want 
the client app to instruct the server to launch windowed apps, which 
I've been able to do so far (using os.system and os.spawnl). The problem 
is that because the server is launching the app, the client app remains 
topmost, with the spawned app sandwiched between the command prompt 
window and the client app window.

Is there a cross-platform way to instruct that spawned app to go to the
front of the stack?