I would love a way to go back to the old versions of TestComplete where that object recognition hint stuff wasn't present. I have never seen this be helpful; it's only caused problems for us when...
Changing the timeout to 50ms still waits almost a full second... which is much better than the 3-15 minutes it was waiting before when the value was set to -1.
Unfortunately, SmartBear's tech support already knows the issue is with the indicator and the object recognition hint message. Their initial stance of "we cannot recreate this problem so we cannot help" still stands. The original tect support issue has been closed from their side... and this post was opened in June with no one from SmartBear replying.