win32 service and time.sleep()

[rbt]

I have a win32 service written in Python. It works well. It sends a
report of the status of the machine via email periodically. The one
problem I have is this... while trying to send an email, the script
loops until a send happens and then it breaks. Should it be unable to
send, it sleeps for 10 minutes with time.sleep(600) and then wakes and
tries again. This is when the problem occurs. I can't stop the service
while the program is sleeping. When I try, it just hangs until a reboot.
Can some suggest how to fix this?

Thanks,
rbt