<p>I'd like to make a click event fire on an <code>&lt;input type="file"&gt;</code> tag programmatically.</p>

<p>Just calling click() doesn't seem to do anything or at least it doesn't pop up a file selection dialog.</p>

<p>I've been experimenting with capturing events using listeners and redirecting the event, but I haven't been able to get that to actually perform the event like someone clicked on it.</p>

You cannot do that in all browsers, supposedly IE
does
allow it, but Mozilla and Opera do not.
When you compose a message in GMail, the 'attach files' feature is implemented one way for IE and any browser that supports this, and then implemented another way for Firefox and those browsers that do not.
I don't know why you cannot do it, but one thing that
is
a security risk, and which you are not allowed to do in any browser, is programmatically set the file name on the HTML File element.