Well, as is typical, the "fix" works for one person, not for another.
destadula, if you want to try 2.5.9, email me and I'll send it to you, but I would be very surprised if it made a difference.
The nature of the error leads me to believe it should only happen when the TD is calling into either the Common Dialog control or into Windows Scripting functions, such as when you save a file, or open the file selection dialog, or the font dialog. And nothing like that happens in the background thread that updates the clock - except for the auto-save code, which is why I asked about that.
So to me it gets lumped into the strange Internet Explorer quirks bucket. I hope we can figure it out, but I'm not holding my breath.