I am using the jquery modal form for popups throughout my very large application. Some of saves can take awhile so I need to have the spinning wheel to tell the users the system is working on it.
Everywhere else in the application the cursor changes to the wheel while processing I just can't get it to show while the popup is open.  If I remove the code to change the cursor back to default it does show the wheel after the popup closes. Is there a setting specifically for the poppup to handle the spinning wheel while ajax calls are processing?
 

NEW information 2/9/2014

I added the line $("#modalpopup").css('cursor'.'wait'); a few lines before I call ajax

and I'm using an alert to pause it when it comes back from the ajax call, the circle does show now during the pause, so I apologize the z-index does help a bit. But there is still something blocking it from changing the cursor from default to wait while the ajax is processing.