How best to achieve asynchronous socket input and output?

[Kylotan]

I'm writing a wxPython telnet-like application that needs to be able
to send and receive data independently of each other. The asyncore
library comes close to what I want, but still requires I have a
blocked thread (the one that calls asyncore.loop() ).  It also seems a
little unpredictable; one example of this is that when I based an
example around the sample HTTP client (11.23.1 in the docs),
handle_write never seemed to get called, and I had to call .send()
directly, bypassing any buffering.

Is there a better way of achieving what I want? Or something I need to
know about the asyncore library to get it to do this?

-- 
Ben Sizer