Tested with 0.1.5
urllib reads the http_proxy environment variable to auto-configure itself for proxy use. However, the widget is unaware of this fact, so it will offload url-retrievals to its worker thread. Those calls could see a 60 second timeout, which is enough for the worker to stay active longer than the parent GUI itself.
Once the call is completed, the error will be communicated to the now closed parent GUI, which caused Maya to crash during my tests. The crash would happen even with the queued-connections fix applied ( #1 ) .
Solutions
Tank receives information about proxy servers for connecting to shotgun, and the widget could use the same proxy by default when using the urllib, making tank configurations less error prone from behind a proxy.
I know that the browser_widget does indeed stop the worker, which should prevent it from emitting anything. However, it didn't work for me.