Suspend A Thread While Waiting For Event?

I am trying to use a separate thread to handle specific events in VB.Net. The idea being that I do not want the main application to be held up if a particular event handler takes awhile to finish. How do I get my main thread loop to suspend the thread while allowing it to handle events when they occur?When I create a Windows Forms application, there is a UI thread that handles the UI events. I do not imagine that this thread is continuously polling some variable to see if someone has pressed a button. I imagine the thread is suspended until the OS tells it there is something to do. I was trying to figure out how to ensure that my event handlers were not being executed by the UI thread. From what I have read, I can do this by raising the events from a different thread. But what does that thread do while it is waiting for other events, just exit?

I wanted to know how to create a thread that works like the UI thread, only it processes the events I want it to process. I am not sure how events work in .Net. I understand that event handlers are run on the thread that raises the event. I believe that .Net allocates threads from some thread pool to process events such as timer events. I am not clear on how it works, though, and what those threads are doing when they are not handling events.