Problem registered in ICE-8372 seems to be not fixed and still occurrs in some cases.
I notice the one workaround is set blockUIOnSubmit to false.

Many cases ICE-7150, ICE-7918,ICE-7746, ICE-8916,ICE-9045 seems to be similar.
In my case I got a problem with part of application migrated from 1.8 to 3.3 . In web.xml I got org.icefaces.blockUIOnSubmit = true. Everything works except one page with modal. If modal is displayed on start then on close everything hangs up and page reload is needed.
The problem doesn't exist if I change one modal="true" to modal="false" or blockUIOnSubmit=false.

Console output from Firebug: (looks ok but UI is really still blocked)
[window.compat] removed modal iframe for : j_idt248:j_idt24 bridge...ce.core (row 1315)
[window] unblocked UI bridge...ce.core (row 1315)
[window] applied updates >>
update["j_idt247"]: <div class="icePnlGrp" id="j_idt247"></d....
update["iceMsgsError"]: <ul id="iceMsgsError"><li><span class="i....
update["dynamic-code-compat"]: <span id="dynamic-code-compat"></span>....
update["javax.faces.ViewState"]: 3251100983868510618:-804321412697498542....
eval: new Ice.MenuBarKeyNavigator('menuActions....
eval: ice.applyFocus('j_idt248:j_idt251');var ....
extension