I suggested what you should do if you want to use threads for background work, aka write to a file or print to the terminal or doing some calculations, but keep all the GUI updates to the main thread (called 'UI thread').

epage mentioned that as well but also extended this to how to handle the GUI itself from within child-threads (also called 'worker threads'), and suggested an alternative - give the gtk to handle your worker threads while it's available using the add_idle example he attached.

An advice - If it's your first work with treads, you might want to know more about threads in general and threads in python before diving into gtk's way for handling threads.