Using your PC while an ODBC call is in progress

We have for more than a year now had in place a 5GIG ONLINE data-warehouse of sales info. ( 5.03 on Compaq/SCO 3.2.4 ) User's access data via Viewpoint, MS-Query, MS-Access or Q+E. All users run Win95 or 3.1 over INET, Intersolve ODBC & TCP/IP. We have no problems with speed or stability but... Depending on the complexity of the queries, SQL calls can take between 1 to 20 minutes. This is still considered good by the users as the old mainframe system required hours or days. (We deal with 120,000 new transactions each night ) Users do not understand why they cannot multitask on a a 100Mhz 486 PC with 16 meg memory while a query is in progress. Why should their PC lock while the report runs, It does not happen with EXCEL or Terminal sessions ? I feel they have good reason to complain. We have tried the TMBlock & YieldProc settings in the ini files but all combintaions except for "wait for data" are unstable. This is true for inet versions 5.01c1 to g1, ODBC ver 1.2 to 2.0 both Win95 and 3.1. ( I cannot consider NT due to cost and support of existing 16bit apps ) To be fair to Informix the multitasking Viewpoint is stable but it spends so much CPU time formating the report that the "PC lock" effect is the same. I see the multi-task aspect of client in client-server as a very Important, a user should be able to start a sales report then read mail or work on a document while the report is being run. Has anyone implemented a stable "Non blocking" ODBC application ?