Hiding the Message Dialog

[mike lear <mikeofthenight2003 yahoo com>]

Hello All,

I am using gtkmm messagedialog windows in a project that I
am writing. My problem relates to using a timeout function
with the dialogs. I am using a signal handler to provide a
visual 10 second countdown of the message window. The timer
works fine and displays the countdown in the dialog message
window. But when it reaches it's timeout of 0 seconds. I am
unable to get the dialog window to hide. The only way I can
hide the window is by using the exit(0); command in place of
the return false; command. Below is the section of code in
question.  I am using the boost library to provide shared
pointers and lexical casts in this function.

bool funkeys::on_timeout(int seconds) { // seconds = 10
    shared_ptr<string> timer(new string);  
    shared_ptr<string> timestr(new string("#~#")); // position to insert seconds
    static  int i = seconds;
    Format fmt;   // A class that format strings to contain markup
                  // Markup & insrepAt part of the Format class
try {

    if (i == 0) {   
                on_button_quit(); // does not work it calls hide()
                hide();       // does not hide the dialog window
//                return false; // this just disconnect's the timer
                exit(0);        // this works but its not nice
                }
    *timer = boost::lexical_cast<string>(i--);  // convert int to string
    Markup tis(*timer);                         // tis time in seconds
    *timer = Bold(Italic(tis))->dataStr();      // add markup to string
    fmt->insrepAt("blue",10.5,*timer,*timestr); // add text colour and size
    Timer.set_text(*timestr);                   // Timer is the gtk label
    Timer.set_markup(*timestr);                 // timestr is the markup string
    Timer.set_use_markup(true);                 // containing the timer seconds
    Timer.get_use_markup();

    } catch(boost::bad_lexical_cast& e) {
    cerr << e.what() << "\nlexical_cast error in function on_timeout\n";
    exit(1);
    }

return true;
}

Any help or ideas will be most appreciated.

Thanks Mike Lear