It seems to me that there are a number of things that you could do to help ameliorate this sort of risk.

The first would be to allow ablative skills to regenerate more frequently rather than just at the start of a session. If you intend to have a couple of scenes in a session which require the same skills (such as a combat), allow the PCs to regenerate their skills between. This would allow for the drama of getting tired (running out of points) during a scene, without that scene affecting others. Depending on how finely tuned GUMSHOE is however, this could be unbalancing.

Another option would be to reward ingenuity, good tactics, good role-playing or heroism etc. with point pool replenishments after or even during the scene. Since it's more under your control, it should be less prone to unbalancing the game.

I have seen this sort of thing with players in card based systems like SAGA, but only with relatively new players. Once you've played SAGA for a while you realise that the best thing you can do with a hand of low cards is to play them and hope to draw better cards, so any solution to this problem is likely to involve players being encouraged to be more active, more inventive, more dramatic when they get down to fewer pool points.

I know my thoughts are rather general, since I haven't played GUMSHOE, but I hope they were useful nevertheless.

Preventing player passivity in GUMSHOE?
I'm thinking that one way Jeff and the Stack Overflow team could squeeze some extra money out of this site would be to automatically convert all Amazon links posted here into affiliate links, e.g. Stick "tag=codinghorror-20" (or more likely a new site-specific tag) onto every Amazon link. This would bring in some additional revenue every time someone purchased a book via a link on this site. 

They could do similar things with other links as well. Amazon's simply the most obvious choice.

So my question is, would anyone have a problem with this?

I know I wouldn't mind, but I don't know how other people would react.

What does everyone think? Is this a horrible idea, a great idea, a waste of time?
