multi-threading in a Pidgin plugin

[Martin Stiborský]

Hello,
I'm working on a plugin for Pidgin. This plugin adds few things into
the UI of the Pidgin and one part is a GtkImage - for this widget, I
need to download a image from network and display it.
More specifically, the image is a avatar photo, stored on company
intranet and when you select a buddy in a buddy list, the image
change.
I need to put this "fetch image" part to another thread I guess -
because I don't want to block the UI.

What is the best practices to do that in Pidgin and libpurple? I've
read a few things about libpurple and thread, but because I'm quite
new to C and multi-processing (posix threads...) at all, I'm confused.
For example, in source codes in pidgin, I've found only one usage of
"pthread_create", so I guess there is a another solution.

Thanks guys, for any hint!

-- 
S pozdravem
Martin Stiborský

Jabber: stibi at njs.netlab.cz