Creating a reliable timer

I usually split the execution into two threads in case where message loop should not intervene with the game. The performance and resource hit is minimal, just understand that even when you play big commercial games there are always programs in the background doing message queue processing looping. Basically you are left with a fully responsive UI and fully responsive separate execution thread :)

And how about using the Multimedia Timer? It runs at pretty high resolution in a separate thread automatically.

Multimedia timers are worth a look if timer accuracy is very important.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...dia_timers.asp