When I first display my screen to the user, I\'d rather not have all the validation messages show up for required fields and such before the user has had a chance to fill in
You can get better answers if you make an effort to post a snippet of your relevant code/XAML. It would make it easier to reproduce and eliminate much of the guesswork.
Try setting ValidatesOnTargetUpdated="False" on your validation rules and see if that helps.