Hi Al,
our OS is Novell 5.1 and I suspect that something "weird" is happening because the app has been runnning for quite some time and this behaviour only became apparent when we made another un-related change.

I looked at SYS(2) and it has a couple of drawbacks: it returns a chr string and not numeric value and it is only to the nearest second. So our phony delay of .5 secs fixes the problem without delaying the process for a whole second.