Ruud is back in town. Here's a reply I just received:

quote:
Well, the brilliant news (this one was seriously getting on my nerves) is that I've repro'd, found and worked around the issue.

The weird thing is that it turns out to be a really obscure (timing-related) issue in one of the C-runtime functions. Never hit this before, and it's really ugly: doesn't occur when run in the debugger, only when run 'for real' (this is part of why I couldn't repro anything earlier....).

Wow, glad to get rid of this one: thanks for your excellent support!

-Ruud