I get the following error:

ERROR 1205 (HY000) at line 20: Lock wait timeout exceeded; try
restarting transaction

This ONLY happenes when I start 2 to 4 concurrent processes. The
scripts involved typically take half a day to a day to complete
(they're rather intensive analysis and simulation scripts), but they
should not interact. While they do write to the same tables, they
spend no more than 5% of their time writing to the tables. Rather,
most of their time is spent either reading data or number crunching.
I would think that since the machine in question has a quad core
processor, it should be able to handle four concurrent sessions even
though these sessions will each max out one core. For some reason,
running a single script at a time maxes out one core leaving the other
three mostly idle. Running four maxes out all of the cores, but
inevitably the above error kills one session at a time until there is
only one left, which runs to completion.

What can I do to fix this so I can successfully run four of my scripts
at a time?

BTW: If it matters, this is with MySQL 5.0.45 running on Windows 2003
server (both 64 bit).

Thanks

Ted