Day/Night cycles in FF6

Ugh, I seem to have hit a bit of a snag. It appears that whenever the timer stops, and you return without fading out the screen, the NPC with the highest number (in the LE) randomly faces upwards. This makes it so that many shop NPC's, for instance, will randomly turn upwards whenever the code darkens the screen and then returns.

This happens even with timers that were used in vanilla, but the NPC's that face upwards aren't visible anyways when these timers are called, or the screen fades out at some point before the timer returns from its code. However, if I do something like delete the five other NPC's in the house on solitary island, the timer there causes Cid to face upwards when it expires.

There are ways around this, but it often requires making an extra NPC to fill the highest slot. As you can imagine, when most hacks fill their NPC counter to the brim, this isn't much of a solution.

I haven't given up hope about this, but I'm not really sure what the problem is. It really just seems to me like the developers did something silly with the timers and didn't catch it through sheer luck.