Thanks, Russ. I can totally relate when you say, "once I have FCP running well, I try to avoid doing anything that I think would have the potential for confusing it." I love FCP X except that it is making me superstitious. It seems that some feature will quit working until I restart. Or the background tasks window will stick on some random percentage of completion even though it has, in fact, finished. It's spooky. So just trying not to "confuse" or maybe even "offend" it makes perfect sense.
I remember way back when I had my Mac Plus, you could often press Command + . [period] to stop a process. That was pretty cool.