Trying to use drupal_http_request to get an admin page I would like to render an admin page in a popup, I thought I'd use the ctools api to render the popup and drupal_http_request to get the data for the page, however even when logged in all I get is an 'unauthorized' error. 
Looking deeper, I think there might be a way, as the function is reputed to support basic authentication, but I can't figure out how to make it work.
This is for Drupal 7.x
Or if there's a different way to render an admin page in a popup that'd be nice too. It's for a client who doesn't want to go back and forth between admin pages so the popup would solve the problem.
The Overlay module in the core is built to do exactly this, to open admin pages in an overlay popup.  You can enable it directly from /admin/modules.