oops.. broke it... it was working, then i pushed it by trying a proof of concept task with a global handle to the midasThread. Not sure what's wrong...
it's better, but not as good as I'd like. Now it allows the midas thread to update the GUI through signals, but for some reason, the global handle to the master thread is being lost...
got it working good-enough. Basically proof of concept is working, and need to make  a proper architecture, as this hacked code isnt working and isnt worth debugging.