> are you sure? when/how often does "last midas program finishes" happen? it does not happen on a system crash, not on power loss, not on "shutdown -r now" 
> (I am pretty sure). In the experiments you run, how often do you shut down all programs (and check that you did not forget one somehow)?

Indeed this is almost never the case, maybe once per months. On the other hand, we have a complete crash of the os maybe once a year. Most of the time the programs 
run continuously (we do not need odbedit), so our timestamp is typically one or two days old, so not good either.

> my vote is to undo this change, it is dangerous because it causes odb to be saved to ODB.SHM never.

My vote is to flush the odb either periodically or after each run.

Stefan