I posted a more substantial answer on comp.windows.*, where you also asked the question. In short, you can`t check whether a timer still has yet to be fired, without tracking that information in the application. At the application level, it is most likely that your timers aren`t firing because of flow errors in the application. Xt assumes that your application correctly keeps registers and unregisters the timers -- of course, to unregister a timer you need all the information about it.