This is a common problem I also encountered in the past. You get a low-level ODB access error (could also be a read of a non-existing key) and you 
have no idea where this comes from. Could be the alarm system, a mhttpd web page, even some user code in a front-end over which the midas library 
has no control.

One option would be to add a complete stack dump to each of these error (ROOT does something like that), but I hear already people shouting "my 
midas.log is flooded with stack dumps!". So what I do in this case is I run a midas program in the debugger and set a breakpoint (in your case at 
odb.cxx:6967). If the breakpoint triggers, I inspect the stack and find out where this comes from.

Not that I print a stack dump for such error in the odbxx API. This goes to stdout, not the midas log, and it helped me in the past. Unfortunately 
stack dumps work only under linux (not MacOSX), and they do not contain all information a debugger can show you.

It is not true that alarm conditions are evaluated when the alarm system is off. I just tried and it works fine. The code is here:

alarm.cxx:591

      /* check global alarm flag */
      flag = TRUE;
      size = sizeof(flag);
      db_get_value(hDB, 0, "/Alarms/Alarm system active", &flag, &size, TID_BOOL, TRUE);
      if (!flag)
         return AL_SUCCESS;

so no idea why you see this error if you correctly st "Alarm system active" to false.

Stefan