Yes, that's what I always hope and assume... that it's not necessary to post each question in XSIbase, si-community and mailing list. Personally, I like this forum best because of the engine(phpBB) used to run it. XSIbase I find frustrating to use because of that.

Hi,
you're doing this with a simulated ICE tree right? The setup in the manual is designed for that (see the simulate node).
The technique you've ended up with will work just fine for non-simulated stuff, but it might be more efficient to do it in a simulated tree since then you can make sure that all that on-emission stuff only happens once per particle.
The setup in the manual works just fine, it's just suggesting that you randomize the start frame and playback speed within certain limits. In order to do that you need to introduce some per-particle variation.