thanks for the info pycage. Yeah, I noticed that if I removed the applet before the thread was complete, the thread stayed alive (so I was rebooting the tablet several times to clean everything).

those set_label calls are not necessary, I was using them for debugging only.

Anyway, I reflashed the tablet, just in case, and did some changes. I noticed that when cairoclock was on the desktop, my applet was more responsive, so that other applet is doing something (I think it's the call queue_draw() ). Anyway, my previous theory (wifi turning idle) seems to be incorrect, I think that actually what's going on is that the hildon desktop needs to notice some activity to stay alive. I did some test by pressing buttons like crazy, maximizing and minimizing apps, and that helped the urlopen calls to finish (of course, this is not too scientific).

Anyway, after reflashing the tablet, it looks like the applet is working better, but it takes 2 minutes to retrieve an xml and 5 small images, which only takes like 8 seconds (with my connection) if i run something similar in the commandline.

I can remove the set_label calls, but the problem still remains that urlopen seems unresponsive inside a thread.

Now, you mention async io via gobject.
I found two possible functions for that: gobject.spawn_async and gobject.io_add_watch
Were you referring to that or something else (I'm new to python and gtk, so not sure if those are the ones).
spawn_async would complicate things a bit, as it's about starting a new process/script

io_add_watch makes more sense, however, the problem is that urllib.urlopen is a synchronous call. The pygtk faq mentions that io_add_watch can obseve the urllib.urlopen return object, however, I couldn't make it work and I couldn't find any examples. As soon as I call urlopen, the ui freezes until it gets the file, so there seems no way to use it with io_add_watch unless...I combine it with a thread, which would beat the purpose of using gobject asynchronously, right?

I might be completely wrong, so please, if you know of any examples or further documentation about how I could get a file asynchronously, I'd appreciate it.