hide / show oddities ?

[Alex Tweedly]

This feels so unlikely that I wonder if I'm simply doing something wrong 
- but thought I'd ask first.

I had a script which is supposed to (amongst other things) hide one 
particular group. Although it usually worked OK, in some cases, 
sometimes, the group would remain visible when it is not supposed to. 
Trying to find this in the IDE/debugger wasn't getting anywhere, so I 
reverted to using "put"s (but still in the IDE). I finished up after a 
few iterations with some code that said


......
hide grp "abcde"
put "here now" && the vis of grp "abcde" &CR after msg
....

and it output
      here now true

So I changed the code to
......
set the vis of grp "abcde" to false
put "here now" && the vis of grp "abcde" &CR after msg
....
and what do you know - not only does it output "here now false", but the 
group *always* becomes invisible.

Does "hide" do anything different from simply setting the visibility to 
false?
Is it remotely possible this isn't me misunderstanding something ?

And then - in a completely different bit of the same app, in a different 
group, I have some code (in the group script) that was doing
...
show me
....
to ensure that the group was visible (inside a timed / delay loop). This 
would occasionally result in some graphics showing up wrongly (in the 
wrong colour) very briefly. Simply changing the code to
....
set the visible of me to true
....
again seems to fix this.

To be honest, if someone else described these symptoms to me, I'd be 
looking for what else was going on that they had forgotten about :-)
But I've already done that - now I'm hoping someone can offer an idea of 
whether this is feasible.
Has anyone else seen anything like this ?
Should I be pursuing an attempt to make this happen in a smaller sample 
so I can submit a useful bug report ?

(oh - glad you asked - Mac OSX 10.8.5, LC 6.6.2)

Thanks
-- Alex.