What s worked well for me is to use a queue to hold unprocessed work and a dictionary to keep track of work in-flight:

1. Create a worker class that takes the filename, start line, and line count and has an update method that does the database inserts. Pass a callback method that the worker uses to signal when its done.
2. Load a Queue with instances of the worker class, one for each chunk.
3. Spawn a dispatcher thread that dequeues a worker instance, launches its update method, and adds the worker instance into a Dictionary, keyed by its thread s ManagedThreadId. Do this until your maximum allowable thread count is reached, as noted by the Dictionary.Count. The dispatcher waits until a thread finishes and then launches another. There s several ways for it to wait.
4. As each thread finishes, its callback removes its ManagedThreadId from the Dictionary. If the thread quits because of an error (such as connection timeout) then the callback can reinsert the worker into the Queue. This is a good place to update your UI.
5. Your UI can show active threads, total progress, and time per chunk. It can let the user adjust the number of active threads, pause processing, show errors, or stop early.
6. When the Queue and Dictionary are empty, you re done.

Demo code as a console app:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading;

namespace threadtest
{
    public delegate void DoneCallbackDelegate(int idArg, bool successArg, string messageArg);

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Supervisor supv = new Supervisor();
            supv.LoadQueue();
            supv.Dispatch();
        }
    }

    public class Supervisor
    {
        public Queue<Worker> pendingWork = new Queue<Worker>();
        public Dictionary<int, Worker> activeWork = new Dictionary<int, Worker>();

        private object pendingLock = new object();
        private object activeLock = new object();

        private int maxThreads = 200;

        public void LoadQueue()
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++)
            {
                Worker worker = new Worker();
                worker.Callback = new DoneCallbackDelegate(WorkerFinished);
                lock (pendingLock)
                {
                    pendingWork.Enqueue(worker);
                }
            }
        }

        public void Dispatch()
        {
            int activeThreadCount;

            while (true)
            {
                lock (activeLock) { activeThreadCount = activeWork.Count; }
                while (true)
                {
                    lock (activeLock)
                    {
                        if (activeWork.Count == maxThreads) break;
                    }
                    lock (pendingWork)
                    {
                        if (pendingWork.Count > 0)
                        {
                            Worker worker = pendingWork.Dequeue();
                            Thread thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(worker.DoWork));
                            thread.IsBackground = true;
                            worker.ThreadId = thread.ManagedThreadId;
                            lock (activeLock) { activeWork.Add(worker.ThreadId, worker); }
                            thread.Start();
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            break;
                        }
                    }
                }
                Thread.Sleep(200); // wait to see if any workers are done (many ways to do this)

                lock (pendingLock)
                    lock (activeLock)
                    {
                        if ((pendingWork.Count == 0) && (activeWork.Count == 0)) break;
                    }
            }
        }

        // remove finished threads from activeWork, resubmit if necessary, and update UI
        public void WorkerFinished(int idArg, bool successArg, string messageArg)
        {
            lock (pendingLock)
                lock (activeLock)
                {
                    Worker worker = activeWork[idArg];
                    activeWork.Remove(idArg);
                    if (!successArg)
                    {
                        // check the message or something to see if you should resubmit thread
                        pendingWork.Enqueue(worker);
                    }
                    // update UI
                    int left = Console.CursorLeft;
                    int top = Console.CursorTop;
                    Console.WriteLine(string.Format("pending:{0} active:{1}        ", pendingWork.Count, activeWork.Count));
                    Console.SetCursorPosition(left, top);
                }
        }
    }

    public class Worker
    {
        // this is where you put in your problem-unique stuff
        public int ThreadId { get; set; }

        DoneCallbackDelegate callback;
        public DoneCallbackDelegate Callback { set { callback = value; } }

        public void DoWork()
        {
            try
            {
                Thread.Sleep(new Random().Next(500, 5000)); // simulate some effort
                callback(ThreadId, true, null);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                callback(ThreadId, false, ex.ToString());
            }
        }
    }
}