Please describe the problem:
A Debian user reported the following at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=382093:

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When connecting to servers which does not respond or respond after a long period of time Pan freezes totally and can only be shutdown with kill -Term
On of the servers which almost every time causes Pan to freeze is news.php.net.

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The problem can be consistently reproduced.


Steps to reproduce:
1. Add news.php.net as the only news server.
2. Under "other groups", right click "php.cvs" and select get headers.
3. Select "get all headers", and watch as pan hangs for a fairly long time before the server finally replies.

Actual results:


Expected results:


Does this happen every time?


Other information:
If I remember correctly, pan is now single threaded, which would explain why the gtk thread hangs during synchronous network calls. 
It would be nice to be able to specify a maximum number of seconds that pan would spend in any one network call, although I am not entirely sure how to accomplish that without the use of a secondary thread/timer.