Cursor blink rate affects FrameMaker stability?

[JX Consulting]

Three writers on my team reported too-frequent crashes in FrameMaker  
8, especially notable because it crashed disproportionately during  
idle time. (As opposed to crashes during one of our extremely complex  
FrameScripts that run 20 minutes or more... those usually completed  
fine.) We do not have any fancy keystroke interception code in  
FrameScript. Well, not yet anyway, I have a plan for some soon. :-)  
So, I wouldn't expect that any of our code affects this Idle-Crash  
issue. So, anyway i noticed one of the writers had a cursor that was  
blinking weird, irregularly. I checked the windows  setting in:  Start  
-> Control Panel -> Keyboard -> Cursor Blink Rate.

His blink rate was set to the MAXIMUM setting. I set it down a couple  
notches. And his crashing problem went away! The two other writers  
checked their setting for that, and theirs were set to the MINIMUM  
setting (no blink). They set theirs UP a couple notches. And their  
crashing problems reportedly also went away too!

Perhaps this is superstitious, but these three writers believe this  
change was what made stability improve. It's possible this issue is  
specific to folks with FrameScript, I have no idea. We all use  
FrameScript.  I could easily imagine this being a system event Idle  
issue either in FrameMaker, FrameScript, or both.

Anyway, if you are having crashing problems in FrameMaker, try setting  
this setting to somewhere in the *middle* of the range and see if that  
helps. If this change reduces your crashes noticably, PLEASE REPLY on  
the forum to this post with more information about your configuration.  
For example, that would clarify whether this is unique to FM8 or  
affects FM9 also, and whether this affects non-FrameScript users!

Configuration for the team:
* Win XP SP3 32bit
   (except 1 writer w/ 64bit, who was 1 of the 3 with the issue)
* FrameMaker 8.0p277
* FrameScript 5.2R1 (some might be R2)

For the record, there are other writers on the team, including me, who  
weren't experiencing these crashes. At least two of us had middle-of- 
the-range settings for this value (and no "idle time" crashes), I'm  
not sure about the other two writers.

   -- JX Bell
      JX Consulting