TRAPNAL with TMOUT problem

[Paul Lew <paullew@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have been setting the TMOUT value and defining TRAPALRM function to
perform some background operation.  However, there is a side-effect I
did not expect:

The 'idle' time for command 'w' is now affected by the invocation of
TRAPALRM function, i.e., if I defined TMOUT to be 3600, zsh will never
show idle more than 60 minutes.

This is not good because I have been using this to track co-worker's
activity so we can roughly know if a user is logining on.  Now this
information is no longer useful.  Any idea what's the best solution
to this?  Thanks.

BTW, I am using zsh-3.1.9 on Solaris 2.6 with /usr/ucb/w command.