Before I submitted this patch, I used to have these variables inside the modulestate, which caused severe problems. I do not know the exact reason, but my guess is that these variables have to be globally available for every thread (tcl variables are used for thread synchronization arent they?). As the modulestate may change depending on the thread, one can no longer guarantee that every thread within the process is operating on the same variable. This might not be nessecary, however as I mentioned, the naive approach of putting the variables inside the modulestate did not work out for me.