Can you explain where the black magic happens? I integrated the cuis changeset back then because I wanted something more fine grained than seconds. Do you think this is already black magic? I think we can make smaller slices today :) That it forces the whole DateAndTime in this precision is probably not necessary and I understand that Sven did his own timestamp. The same goes for timezones. Maybe we need more levels of features in the hierarchy. If the system (or any software) is not dependent on precision below a second it would be good to have such a coarse grained type at hand. But to have the possibility to have at least milliseconds I find important.
My wild guess would be the startup initialization of DateAndTime. It takes quite while to do. So the code forks off the initialization in order not to slow down startup. Without knowing exactly my gut tells me this is not a good idea. It might be that it produces late jumps of time in startup which makes timeouts inactive. Or jumps the check for negative delays and introduces some negative wait which will native wise quit big. Were we at "wild guessing" or "very wild guessing" again?
agreed.