This change attempts to reinstate as a universal property something
which was sporadically true of the ad-hockery that came before
toplevel callbacks: that if there's a _very long_ queue of things to
be done through the callback mechanism, the doing of them will be
interleaved with re-checks of other event sources, which might (e.g.)
cause a flag to be set which makes the next callback decide not to do
anything after all.
[originally from svn r10040]