work_struct not getting scheduled

Hi, At my end I was using tasklets to do some handling. But while doing the handling the handler had to sleep, so I had to switch to workqueues. I am scheduling a work as follows: INIT_WORK(&event->work, do_handling_work); schedule_work(&event->work); flush_scheduled_work(); But the work never gets scheduled. I have put some printks in the do_handling_work() function. Creating workqueue and queueing the work to that workqueue doen't work either. I find this a very strange problem. Does anybody knows about this? FYI: my system has heavy IO load when I schedule the work. Thanks