Panel lockups

[Matthew Pratt <mattpratt yahoo com>]

I have been seeing lockups of my panels for while now a have decided to
do something about it.

The behavior I am seeing is a complete non response of either of the
panels for periods of up to 30 seconds. Buttons will not prelight, menus
will not open, and if a menu is open when the lockup occurs, it will get
stuck for the duration.

Then all of the sudden the panel will come good and all my clicks will
seem to be registered at once.

I assume that the panel and all its applets run from the same gtk_main()
event loop and if any one applet blocks then the whole thing will block.
Am I correct in assuming this???

If so then I suspect that the culprit is the mail check applet trying to
connect to my pop3 mail server over my "fast as a piece of wet string"
modem connection.

If this is the case then I intend rewrite the applet to use a
non-blocking async connect (not that hard to do I have already started).

Can someone confirm that this is likely the cause, and who I should send
patches to?

Is it best to produce a patch against the (gnome-core) CVS tree or the
latest source release?

Cheers,
Matty