Monitor keypresses without gui

there's no way to receive/respond to actions and controls without drawing a gui, right?

i'd like to have a sleeper script running in the background that only opens when you press a series of buttons in the right order (without capturing those actions, so that you can still operate xbmc in the meantime). it could be useful for other features, too, such as supplementing (or replacing) the visualization screen that appears when you press "x" for instance.

is there any way to draw an invisibile xbmcgui.window that won't interfere with xbmc operation, or any other workaround? i can't think of any....