Again this is one of the things that is in a grey zone to be considered a bug... I think
when in standby mode VC still generate the Alternates event even without a prefix.
in theory the Alternates event is generated on VC when it hears things not very clearly. I think, it is logical that this event is not generated in standby mode until a prefix.start event triggers.
I solved this manually, by disabling the group in which I placed the macro that runs with alternates event. However VC still display the options OSD, and history window is filled with lots of lines
PS: version is 2.1.4.2 (can't remember if older versions had similar behaviour)