Thanks for the reply Rémi. I am calling the dbus_g_thread_init_default(); from the main thread before the event loop thread is started. I guess I'm hearing a mixed message. On the one hand it is claimed to be thread-safe under certain conditions (even though it makes use of non thread safe functions?). On the other hand it appears to be strongly not recommended to try to do this. I guess the safest thing will be to move all the d-bus code to run in a single thread. Does it matter if this is not the main thread? Sadly this will be considerable re-factoring!! Perhaps some warning should be put on the d-bus webpage to warn people from trying to use the library with threads? It seems from what you say it is not just me who has fallen into this trap... Ivan <div class="gmail_quote">2010/8/23 Rémi Denis-Courmont <<a href="mailto:remi@remlab.net">remi@remlab.net</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Le lundi 23 août 2010 20:34:37 Ivan Barr, vous avez écrit : <div class="im">> Thanks Ville, > > Is this generally received wisdom or from painful personal experience? </div>There are ample documentation on why this really does not work in the past few months on this same mailing list. libdbus was not designed with this in mind. <div class="im"> > Are the d-bus libraries designed to be thread safe or is it that it just > doesn't work very well? </div>Yes and no. libdbus only claims to be thread-safe if you call the thread initialization function before anything in your process space uses libdbus. Thread initialization is not thread-safe (so you can't do it from a library that cannot reach main()). Also libdbus calls a bunch of non-thread-safe functions internally, including unsetenv() and Xlib. -- Rémi Denis-Courmont <a href="http://www.remlab.net/" target="_blank">http://www.remlab.net/</a> <a href="http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis" target="_blank">http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis</a> _______________________________________________ dbus mailing list <a href="mailto:dbus@lists.freedesktop.org">dbus@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dbus" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dbus</a> </blockquote></div>