Exception Processing with Timer and Rule

We have several Process Model that have nodes for user tasks.  A lot of these nodes need to terminate based on a couple of decisions.  The first being a timer (that is configured to skip this node when the timer expires) and the second being a rule such as "and(not(pv!isManageSubmit),pv!isUnlock)".  We are seeing a lot of orphaned processes that never complete and most seem to be stuck on a node with this type of a configuration.  In one process we were able to put the rule before the node in an XOR and just have the timer for the exception and it works great.  Has anyone else experienced this situation?  Is this a bad practice?

Thanks in advance for any information someone can share.

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