I'm not sure how thoroughly you tested this before posting your results, but I tested this again a few times and the beam event always fires before I finish the first word of my voice command. Certainly long before my commands is recognized.
I have done more tests. created new copy of VC folder ..emptied the commands except for one ... it turn out you are right, the beam event does fire before the vc.reco. however sometimes it does not fire at all, then fires for whatever noise is around after the command which led me to conclude it is after ... see the attached log. line 620 and 700 (if opened in NotePad++) the commands do not have kinectbeam event before.
after this post I am conducting another test, I will put back my full configuration file again. and see if the same things happens and I will post here..
just for the remote possibility of influence, I am running VC on a MAC mini 2006 core2 T5600 1.83GHz with 2GB ram and an SSD. when my full configuration is loaded VC will take about 100MB of RAM, while in the test setup above (1 command) it is 50MB ...