I am not sure if its possible without making things ugly and unecessary painful.

When we create a new Task/Activity from Account or Contact page and then Save it , it returns us to the Account or the Contact page associated with the task.

 What I want to do is to pop up a dialogue when user clicks save on a task/activity OR atleast redirect the user to the task detail section (view mode) and not to the account/contact page.

Is this possible without going the visualforce way? (I cant find a way to override the functionality of save button under buttons and links etc). It would be great if I could just resolve it without creating a VF page.

If NOT then:

I am not sure if i can just have a visualforce page for the EDIT button for task/activity and just say <detail mode='Edit'>.

If thats not possible is there an easy way to just ready the layout and set the UI through code in visualforce. Basically i just want to recreate the edit page for task/activity for different scenarios e.g log a call  etc.

Any examples would be helpful.

All I want to do is pop up a message based on a field set while creating a task/activity and its just getting uglier and uglier to accomplish something simple as that.