the thing that me and dan are doing doesn't use MFC, mostly cause we don't know that yet

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we're planning on developing a console app that runs in an infinite loop, that grabs the bytes from the serial port, then outputs them to various files. from that, a flash program, also running in an infinite loop, picks up these variables from the text file, and outputs them to a nice, pretty GUI. sure, it's super inefficent, but what the hell do i care? also, yes, it's only for my team, and has to be redesigned every year (the flash part at least). i like the way we're doing it though, because it's a creative solution to a problem.
anyways, all that i need is a mini program that grabs the variables, then just writes them all out to various text files. to do this, i really only need one loop. so, would i not need multithreading to do this, right? all that i need is a simple program that will try to open the com port, and if that works, start transmitting. after the transmission ends (program is closed), the com port must be closed, and then that's all that the C++ program has to do.
if i do need mutliple threads, then i guess i would follow the white paper exactly, and then just do a simple other program to write to the text files. i'm not sure exactly how i would do that, but i have all summer.
so, if someone could tell me whether or not i need mutiple threads? thanks.