Waking a sleep() routine

[SNYDER, BARRON F. (AIT)]

I'm looking for a way to pause a Python application for 10 minutes. Using
sleep(600) works but freezes the application while it's sleeping; no screen
repainting, no response to keyboard events like ctrl-c, etc. I tried putting
sleep() into a loop where each time through it would sleep for 1 second and
do it 600 times but still wouldn't respond to system events. How can I use
this function (or something else) so that the app can still respond to
system events but pause for 10 minutes? Does Python have something like
java's "yield( )" or visual basic's "DoEvents"?

Thanks,
Barron