> I am pondering having squeak just refresh every 5 seconds or so, but I
> think that could be pretty annoying.

Yup. But you could use the real-time clock to figure out when the last
time was that a world cycle occured. If that's been longer than five (or
perhaps rather fifteen) secs ago I'd say it's fine to refresh the entire
thing. If your app is zippy enough you may even go down to one sec or
so.

> Unfortunately both of these fixes are pretty ugly for a commercial
> enduser app.

Yeah, but what's more important for a commercial app?! That there's a
bit of ugly code in there or that the damn thing looks okay when you
wake it up?! ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas