Window "whites out" while script busy

[Phil <philtickle200 yahoo com>]

Hi

New to gtk2-perl so this may be a dumb question.   I've been writing a program where the underlying business 
does a lot of intensive finding and sorting and, on a large job, consumes a decent chunk of memory. When it 
finishes, results are written to a file and the file gets parsed into a TextView inside a ScrolledWindow 
widget.

On a small job, this is fine, but on a large job the gui sort of "whites out" with widgets inside no longer 
being visible and unresponsive, while waiting for the sorting to finish.  

How do I prevent this?  Do I need to fork a child and do all the sorting there?  Or can I "disconnect" the 
gui somehow until the data is ready to be displayed?

Thanks

-phil

-phil