Maya 2012 idle event issue

This might be old news to some but I just discovered another baffling "feature" of Maya 2012. Try this in the Python editor of a Maya session you can do without:

import maya.utils
def foo():
  print 'here'
  maya.utils.processIdleEvents()
maya.utils.executeDeferred( 'foo()' )

Boom! Infinite recursion, stack blows up, segfault, good night.

So what's going on here? Well, it seems that somehow processIdleEvents() doesn't actually pop the event queue until after it's processed an event. Call me old fashioned but isn't that kinda backwards? Wouldn't you pop the queue right after you acquire the event, just to prevent issues like this?

The reason I came across this in the first place is we had a case of someone launching a Python script from MEL using evalDeferred, in order to avoid these massive UI deadlocks that would regularly happen due to some unfortunate combination of Maya 2009, Linux, pyQt and context menus. Now, deep down in one of our Python modules someone else had added a call to processIdleEvents() in order to guarantee that a loadPlugin() call has completed before proceeding - most probably due to some other synchronization issue in the Maya Python engine. You can guess what happened next, to everyone's stunned amazement: the script simply restarted, without any clue whatsoever why that might be.

The way I was able to catch this was by using 'traceback' to print out the call stack at a certain place in a module that I happened to have control over, realizing where the jump was happening. The solution? I'm not quite sure yet but it seems as though the UI deadlocks that gave rise to the use of evalDeferred in the first place have been mitigated post Maya 2009, so hopefully by just using a straight-up python() call instead we can put this behind us. However, this somewhat unorthodox treatment of idle events seems as something that should at least be mentioned in the API docs, if not fixed, period.

Or did I get any or all of this backwards? Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on the matter!