Okay I'm not sure I understand this. I was under the impression that the main loop was always running. Does this mean that when I run a timeout, the main loop "waits" for whatever the timeout does to finish before it continues on? Observing my program it does seem like that is the case.

Each run of the timeout in my program polls a certain website for changes, parses the new data (if any) and if there's something new it displays the data in the gui. So each run of the timeout has to wait for the webpage to be fetched which is where the slowdown is coming from.

If I'm understanding how the main loop works, I think I'd like to have the main loop not wait for anything the program does in the background, but again I'm not sure if that's the right way to solve the problem. (Update: I should clarify that what I mean by "anything the program does in the background" is anything like the polling of the website that is not triggered by any gui events, it just does that all the time. In other words I want these background functions to be a seperate operation that doesn't effect the gui (unless there's something new to be displayed). Hopefully I'm making sense here ;-)