Eyes closed until first puppet talks

I have a 1:25 long scene, with only one puppet in the scene. There are 9 MP3/visemes in the scene, with a second or two in between the visemes to make it look/sound more natural. With auto blink enabled, the puppet's eyelids are closed 100% of the time in between the MP3/visemes. While she is talking, the auto blink functions as expected.

Also, the scene will not allow me to record just the auto blink track with everything else turned off.  With the Auto Blink parameter enabled, when I click Record, a message appears that says, "Record-arm a parameter or turn on the microphone." Auto Blink is armed.

Thanks for asking! Typically I am using the defaults but I tried tweaking them to something I saw on the forums about changing the duration to 40ms.  I think it might have to do with the number of puppets in a scene. My animations tend to have 4 or more characters in a scene and I think it might just be too much of a resource pull. I noticed that it doesn't happen with a scene with 2 characters or at the very beginning of a work session. As my machine is building up layers of undo and previous versions in history that quirk seems to show up more. That's what I'm going with!