Well, I read the dt tutorial again and used their example to do some testing. I created 3 textboxes and the following events:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/4KekI.jpg" border="0" />
Which produced the following results.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/SxkC1.jpg" border="0" />
You can see the timers which rely on "every tick" are in synch, whereas the one which relies on "every x seconds" is lagged (until the numbers from the right of the decimal carry over and then it catches up).
This was unexpected behavior for me. I guess I need a better understanding of frames. I am interested in this problem because I am creating a musical game where time is very important.