Comment 5 for bug 237073

Sorry about the long delay - I had completely forgotten about this bug report!

One quick question - why wouldn't you expect the Tk backend to not error? Does that backend run in the same thread?

I tested with all the backends that I could and found the problem only occurs in the GTK backends.

Specifically I found:

GTK - raised ValueError
GTKAgg - raised ValueError
GTKCairo - raised ValueError

Backends that worked fine (i.e. raised KeyboardInterrupts - i didn't check any plotting however)
TkAgg
Agg2
Agg
Cairo
GDK
Pdf
PS
SVG
Template

And backends that i don't have the required modules for, or no support for:
FltkAgg
QtAgg
Qt4Agg
WX
WXAgg
CocoaAgg
EMF

Anything not listed in not present in my matplotlib.backend.all_backends list.