well, i made some progress. I changed the code a bit, but still didn't work.

But I was lucky to find out something just by chance.

I think openurl never times out, that's why there's no error to report.

The other thing is that it seems that eventhough the device is connected via wifi, I think the connection goes idle.

Somehow, calling openurl in the main thread makes the connection alive again, but if it's called in a thread, it stays dead.

Now, what I found is that if I click on the wireless status icon several times, the code manages to grab the xml after a few seconds. So I'm guessing the wireless applet does something (a system call?) to check for the status or the network or something, and that makes everything else work.

I guess this has to do with dbus, but I have no idea about it, so I'll keep searching :P