most all purposes, we recommend using the global critical region in which case this argument is zero. The use of multiple critical regions can cause problems such as deadlock, i.e. when thread #1 is inside critical region A waiting on critical region B, but thread #2 is inside critical region B and is waiting on critical region A. In a flexible programming environment such as Max, deadlock conditions are easier to generate than you might think. So unless you are completely sure of what you are doing, and ab