I'll be following very carefully your name's descent to the Martian surface, Snoots, and hoping it all goes well for you (and for NASA and humanity itself).

The viewer, not the server, generates particles when the object is within draw distance. As far as the server's concerned, particles are nothing more than a bunch of numbers stored in the prim's data. If nobody's around to see the particles (like trees falling in the forest), it's just those numbers...

I don't know what happens to events in progress at the time the sim stopped. I would expect they'd be terminated. A good practice is to design your code for cases where events fail to execute. I've been trying to do this more lately, in the knowledge that OpenSim will terminate events if they've bee...

Now here is something that further confuses the issue. Look at this modification of your script John: integer b; default{ touch_start(integer a){ b = FALSE; if (b = TRUE) { llOwnerSay("TRUE!"); } b=TRUE; if(b = FALSE) { llOwnerSay("FALSE!"); } } } When this is run, it says TRUE! But the "reverse" l...

You're welcome, Snoots. Information like this needs to be shared more widely than it is. Some thoughts on specific points: is in my mind an ultimate example of really bad coding structure Absolutely! I only wrote that as a bare-bones snippet to demonstrate the behaviour of = in an if statement. Some...

Yes, to know why a region restart breaks those scripts, we'd need to see the code. One possible contender, which I've seen in freebie scripts in SL, is something like this: changed(integer change) { llResetScript(); } which is an indiscriminate reaction to any change that fires that event, and I've ...

Scripts are definitely not reset on a region restart (otherwise, there'd be no point in having change(CHANGED_REGION_START) because it would never happen!). The current script state is saved, and restored when the region sim boots. For the most part, scripts don't have to worry about region restarts...

= is a logic comparison (Boolean) if (A = TRUE) This isn't quite true, Snoots - it's a lot simpler than that[1]. Consider this code: integer b = FALSE; if (b = TRUE) llOwnerSay("huh?"); If = were a boolean comparison operator, you'd expect no output, but it prints "huh?". Why? The reason is that = ...

I think the other issue was this code in the touch_start() event:

I'm a little surprised that compiled even in SL - the "spin==0" part should be "spin=0" (assignment, not comparison). Graham's version fixed that.

My first guess is that this line needs changing:
That's assuming the backboard prim is link number 11, which might not be the case if the object has been relinked.