Request time out

Hi
I have a LibWWW based application that encounteres some ftp host URLs to
which it cannot establish a connection, in fact it waits indefinetely
(so does Netscape strangely enough).
To the best of my knowledge i can't use HTHost_setEventTimeout() which
many people have tried and complained about, because I am  using
pre-emptive requests.

Could i use basic timer functions to go around the problem ?
perhaps HTTimer_new and in callback function handle the time out ?

I need to be able to abort the request after a set time interval.

Any help is greatly appreciated, also a quick example of how to use
HTTimer* functions would be great.

Thanks