slow load bc of drawing area

[Rob Huffstedtler <rob bagpipe com>]

Work continues slowly on my map editor for my RPG.  One minor issue that
has been bothering me is that it takes a little over a second to finish
loading.  I know that what is going on is that it takes about a second for
it to tile the cells into the 8K by 8K drawing area (which is contained in
a scrolled window).  This wouldn't be too bad, but it brings up the window
almost immediately, just without any buttons or anything.  When it has
finished drawing into the pixmap and blits it to the screen, then all the
controls appear.

I thought that it might be a good idea not to show the window until this
was all done (thinking that later I might add a splash screen or somethin
just so the user knows that it is responding).  When I tried that, it
wouldn't load, because the window attribute of my drawing areas is NULL.

Does anyone have a suggestion for either getting around this or somehow
speeding up the load time of my app?

Thanks!

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