If there is no network access then the weather plugin hangs the panel (at least SVN), until a network timeout occurs. Is this fixable without out of process plugins?
Sure, the plugin could simply use non-blocking I/O on the socket.
Is this a dupe of 657?
yep it's a duplicate *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 657 ***
Re-assigning to Colin Leroy who is the new maintainer of the plugin.