Problem running consecutive scripts.

One of our programmers has run into a problem with a script. We are running 7.21 on AIX. This person is running a script which calls six other scripts consecutively. The problem was on the last script, it was supposed to update a table, but this was not working. After some debugging, we put a sleep right before the last script, and that fixed the problem. My hypothesis is that the second to last script wasn't releasing a cursor in time for the next script. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Does anyone have a workaround other than putting in that sleep to fake a delay??? Thanks in advance, JP