PyQt is thread-safe to the same extent that Qt is thread-safe. The Qt docs will tell you which parts of their API are guaranteed to be so, and under what circumstances.

Cross-thread signals are thread-safe, so calling the updatePB method in your example is okay. Your ConnDisconn method is not thread-safe, but that has got nothing to do with PyQt or Qt – it’s just a consequence of how you wrote it. The serialEnabled attribute could be read/written by two threads simultaneously, so the behaviour is strictly undefined. A thread-safe way of writing this would be to use a mutex, like so:

class serialThreadC(QThread):
    updateOutBox = QtCore.pyqtSignal(str)
    updateStatus = QtCore.pyqtSignal(int)

    def __init__(self):
        super(serialThreadC, self).__init__()
        self.ser = False
        self.state = 0
        self._mutex = QMutex()
        self.serialEnabled = False   

    def ConnDisconn(self):
        self._mutex.lock()
        self.serialEnabled = not self.serialEnabled
        self._mutex.unlock()

    def run(self):
        while True:
            if self.state == -3 or self.state == -2:
                self._mutex.lock()
                if self.serialEnabled:
                    self.updatePB(20)
                self._mutex.unlock()
            elif self.state == 0:
                self._mutex.lock()
                if self.serialEnabled:
                    self.updatePB(20)
                self._mutex.unlock()

(NB: if you’re using any kind of IDE or debugger, and you are getting unexpected errors or crashes, your first step in diagnosing the problem should always be to test the code in a standard console. Quite often, the IDE or debugger itself can be the cause of the problem, or may mask error messages comming either from Python or from underlying libraries, such as Qt).