How do you kill a thread aside from abort()?

Hi, As the subject states, how can I kill a thread aside from abort()? I'm asking this question because it appears that abort method does not complete a task before it "aborts" the current thread, so I end up doing some cleaning up of my own, making extra lines of code. Or am I missing something? I am sorry if its odd but I believe that the less number of lines I code the less bugs I need to fix. Hanggang sa muli, Tikbalang