Partition Reindexing

What is the effect of reindexing a partition on the inherited table?

For example I have a table 'test' with partitions 'test_01_07',
'test_02_07', 'test_03_07', 'test_04_07', corresponding to data from
January 2007, February 2007, and so on. I noticed that when I run a
reindex on 'test_02_07' (with a large index ~3Gb) the inserts into
'test_04_07' are extremely slow eventually locking up the entire
database.

Is there a way I could run the reindexing/vacuuming/analyzing
processes without affecting the rest of the partitions?

This is on PostgreSQL 8.1.3 on Windows 2003 Advanced Server.