Gnome:: thread safety

[John Spray <jcspray icculus org>]

Hi,

In order to keep the user interface responsive while my program is
generating thumbnails using Gnome::ThumbnailFactory, I have another
thread which is running an event loop:
    while (Gnome::Main::events_pending())
      Gnome::Main::iteration ();

I'm finding that sometimes the thumbnail generating thread is getting
frozen in gnome_thumbnail_factory_new.  I can resolve this by using
Glib::Mutex to protect Gnome::Main operations from all
Gnome::ThumbnailFactory operations, but in this case the UI is still
unresponsive during the thumbnail generation.

So the question is: how can I keep the ui responsive while inside a
Gnome:: call?

Regards,
John