Well that didn't last long. Clearing out "Mark as vehicle" worked for my non-vehicle cameras, getting consistent 80msec makes with just ipcam-combined. Then minutes later I upgraded to the latest BI (5.6.9.3 from 5.6.9.2), and now the non-vehicle camera ai details are showing plates again... with mark as vehicle blank... back to 160msec makes.
The update did fix the problem with AI not working after a reboot though. Plate percent is also fixed. This is much more important to me, and it seems like streamlining cpai lpr is right around the corner at this point.
A major fix I noticed though... +images and interval are being honored and working 100% as I expect!!! I thought I was just trippin'. I knew this was how it is supposed to work, and thought that always getting less images to AI and at seemingly random intervals was not a big deal. That piqued my ocd... now that it works I can do some things with tuning that I was hoping to do before.
[edit: On a side note... the ram was needed, but I could have got away with 16gb. After dropping in the 32gb kit, after warming up all of the make times are really tight... like 72-78msec no variance, even with lots going on. Windows 11 shows ~10-12GB being used... ~9gb going to cpai. So 8gb I'm thinking may be a little too thin for optimal lpr.
I also switched to the high model after the ram upgrade. No typos so far... but only a few very clean caps so far. Not sure if high affects the OCR, or if it's just placebo effect, but I'll know this evening when the usual NightPlates go by. ]