Starting a seperate thread from a GUI

Hi,

I'm trying to get a handle on starting a seperate socket thread from a GUI.

I'm pretty clear on how to do it from the command line, but for whatever
reason, starting it from a button (which is necessary since it needs to have
parameter info entered from the GUI instead of command line) isn't working
properly.

Does anyone have a simple example to share? Basically, I just need a polling
loop, but I have other things on the gui (i.e. a graph) that need to refresh
while this is happening.

Best,

Ted