Mark,
One thing to be aware of is that starting up a thread while you have the active .idx opened in SMAT can cause a problem with initiating the saved message process. Since you have the active .idx opened in SMAT, cloverleaf cannot open it for writing. The thread will still start up but without writing to the saved message file. Not a good thing. You might have to refer to the saved message file and find out it was never saving the messages.
Best method is the manner in which Jim K, indicated.