the race is that there's nothing to say that the clunk completes before the
process continues on to do something more, including some action that depends on the clunk completing,
such as simply repeating the open. that open can fail if the mode or the name
imposes particular constraints; constraints that depend on the order of events as
expressed by the process.
Of course, we don't want the process to wait.
On a 'decent' file server, TClunk doesn't do anything that a process would have to wait for, except invalidate the FID; (I exclude ORCLOSE and OEXCL files here). Guarding this with MCACHE means that there was already a statement from the user "I think that this file server is a decent character.". You can definitely write file servers on which TClunk does things -- ones in which the right combination of opens and clunks fires the missiles, for example. This is not for those file servers.
On a decent server, since clunk cannot fail and won't launch the missiles, you can't really do anything that would depend on the result anyway...
Seem reasonable?
-- vs