Canceling A ThreadPool Thread That's Being Blocked By A .NET Method?

I have a task that needs to be executed many times in a thread, so as to keep my GUI responsive. Right now I'm using the ThreadPool to accomplish the tasks, and it works perfectly. I get all the data I expect back from the threads, life's good. When those tasks are finished, I then fire off another set of threads to accomplish another set of tasks, in the same fashion. The work method of these threads uses a call to RegistryKey.OpenRemoteBaseKey, which does exactly that, opens a remote registry key. The problem is: if the user running the application does not have permission to open the remote registry the call will throw an IOException, but I expect this behaviour because the user does not have permission to do it. However, the call itself can take FOREVER.

I wrote the application initially to use delegate methods and used the WaitHandle.WaitOne() method on AutoResetEvents in a state object I passed to each delegate. I tried the WaitOne method using a timeout, which worked fine until I realized that even though the WaitOne timed out, the thread was still running. This is a problem because (from what I understand) processes are only given a certain number of ThreadPool threads and, once used, they must be finished in order to be released back to the threadpool. In my work method, I also have a variable that can be signalled when the thread should be stopped, but that (obviously) only works on code that I've written.how can I cancel a thread that's stuck on a .NET method? Is there some sort of garbage collection method I can call if I give it a handle?