I was going to say the same thing. Since the lagbursts were causing 14s of lag
or something, why not have it just update at boot while the system does
backups or such instead of during playtime. I assume that in the old way, it
was updated every time someone trained exp to a skill/spell/level/ability.
Thus, if you have it done at boot, shouldn't affect the game too much as it
would just be read as almost a mere text file by mortals.

-- Lord Tarken Aurelius, the Sage