>In the spirit of not wasting lifetime and investing in efficient code from chatter: LLF should not be prone to that particular problem?

I was surely thinking of that... for now, sleep(800) works, but who knows, on some slower machines or on some errors (that external exe is doing... dunno what) it may actually time out, so a combination of llff check and sleep(200) until perhaps 25 seconds total is the plan.