Non-Blocking GUI developement

["Melvin Newman" <zexelon gmail com>]

First off I am a noob with GTK+. 

Basically I am writing a program that is to interface with a server program over a network. As such this client program has effectively 2 parts, 1) the backend code that connects to the server and handles all the data communications, 2) the front end GUI that presents the code to the user. 

The problem that I am running into is that I cant get the gui to update in a timely manner (a problem that allot of us GTK noobs seem to have, but one which no one answers clearly). I have tried the following at key places in my code: 

while(gtk_events_pending())
        gtk_main_iteration();

And while this does update the gui, the user still has no control over it. For example if the user select file->exit, the menu drops down but the exit button has no effect. Can GTK+ run multiple signal handlers concurrently? 

In my first write of this program I used pthreads however I did it in a very very unsafe manner and the client program would frequently crash because both gtk_main() and my thread where doing gui operations. 

My main question therefore is, how do I write a responsive gui that can communicate in  real time over the backend networking code? Is pthread the way to go? If so, how do I guarantee that the pthread code will work on a single processor/core machine? My last pthread code ran ok on my dual proc desktop, but died on my single proc laptop. 

Thank you very much for any help you can provide this noob. 

Sincerely
Melvin