MaxScript and crashing the UI's redraw

This is something I’ve been wondering for a while. I haven’t actually put huge effort into figuring out why this happens, so… well, if there’s a part of the manual that explains it, you can all feel free to yell at me to RTFM.

On most of my MaxScripts, I end up batching huge piles of objects or files. This always seems to make the 3DStudio window gray out, or even claim to have stopped working, but I can still see that the script is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Is there as simple way I can prevent the UI from pretty much crashing during massive batch operations? I can’t be the only one to have experienced this.

MaxScript runs in the same thread as the rest of 3ds Max. Unless there’s some newfangled juju I’m not hip to, there’s no way to make a MaxScript process run in a background thread and keep the UI responsive during long script operations.