Image exists does not time out?

The OCR issue has a workaround here: UIPath has stopped working - OCR - #6 by UiRobot

Image Exists may give late timeouts…as it takes about 7 seconds (on my laptop) to search the entire screen once. If it starts again at timeout-1s it will end at timeout+6s and only then throw the exception. Is this your problem?
It will be solved in a later version.