When creating a dialog with jquery, how do I hide the dialog div?

This may be a stupid question, but instead of "visibility:hidden" have you tried "display:none;"? I had to solve the same problem for a project I'm working on and I'm reasonably sure display:none worked.

You can also use the

$(foo).dialog({ autoOpen: false });

option to "initialize" the dialog (thus hiding it and all that good stuff). The only catch is, you'll probably see the dialog "flicker" as the page loads but before jQuery has a chance to hide it.