[Click] background processing?

[Nicholas Murphy]

If I want to have a background process in click that does  
asynchronous processing, what's the best way to do it?  Task/Timer?

What I'd ideally like is something that basically runs when there are  
spare CPU cycles.  In other words, it would ideally strictly defer to  
the main click processing thread.

Suggestions?  I actually tried just spawning a new thread with  
pthreads, but unfortunately I'm running into compilation issues with  
pthread.h and c++. :-/

(I'm only concerned with userlevel for the moment)

Thanks,
Nick