best threading solution?

[wysota]

You don't need any "download thread". It's not that there is a dwarf sitting there and constantly pulling a string that has your incoming data attached to it and which needs constant bugging to get to work. When the data arrives into the socket you will be informed about it, you can read the data (which takes literally miliseconds) and afterwards you can attend to other tasks. When more data arrives, you will again be informed about it, you will read the data and go back to the other task. On the other hand if you do it with threads, your thread will sit around doing nothing 99% of the time and you will have a lot of trouble in synchronizing all your threads.

Your while() loop can be decomposed into a simple timer running with 100ms interval that triggers a slot that calls "doWork()".

Here, read this: [wiki]Keeping the GUI Responsive[/wiki]