Want to thank everyone for their ideas and warnings. I'm going to try and implement this with the threads as mentioned by BrowserUk. I do have some concerns though regarding error situations, and what kind of curveballs Windows will throw at me. Most of my coding is on FreeBSD, and so I cringe anytime I have to write code for the Win32 platform.

I guess we will see what happens.

Also, I figured I'd mention that my "long_running_function()" is using OLE to launch an external application (Quickbooks to be exact), and is performing a query to Quickbooks that can take up to an hour to return a response. (And this is on reasonably high end hardware btw) I'm trying to work with the client to redesign a couple of things to break up this Quickbooks query into several smaller queries, but the client isn't wanting to break the query up yet.