Thanks Ben, I have been using QPointer<> throughout my code, and will consider your suggestions for the others to have "safe pointers" that become zero upon deletion.

What I do not fully understand is whether or not a thread whose run() method (which simply calls exec()) actually pends? I want my secondary threads to pend until they have data to process, hence
the pending queue requirement.

It would seem that the event loop has to be somewhat "running" in the thread for it to both generate signals and respond to invoked slots. This is atypical of nearly all embedded systems that I have
worked on, where tasks lay dormant until necessary for them to perform work.

There has to be some method to have Qt act more like an embedded system of cooperatives tasks, with atomic queues, pending queues, separate task priorities, etc.

My target hardware is a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, single core, so code techniques that utilize threads running on separate cores does not apply.