This article looks thread management in a Swing GUI. There's more to success than simply spinning up background threads for long-running operations: you need to get the results of these operations back to the user, control the sequencing of not-quite-independent operations, and provide feedback to the user while the operation is running.
Here the uplifting account of how a broke construction worker found financial freedom in a few short months, and how it effected the lives of others. If you are looking for a system anyone can use with no experience then have a look.
S. Voida, and E. Mynatt. CHI '09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, page 259--268. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)