Alexander Stein wrote:

Okay, I was just wondering why the timeout is dependant on the timer tick.
That didn't seem obvious to me.
Rethinking about this, I would rather replace those lines with msleep instead.

What's wrong with leaving it as-is?  The code is five years old, and 
Freescale/NXP barely uses the QE any more.  I don't have access to any 
hardware to test any changes you would propose.