Dear Frank,
I have the feeling that in these days we are confronted not with many different bugs, but with a single one that exposes itself in many different occasions/situations.
I believe this single bug causes (at least):
1. what you describe here
2. the unbalanced braces problem
3. the fact that the log appears corrupted every now and then
4. the SendFd misbehavior, the one I, ehm, "corrected" with a Sleep
This, I believe, is a threading/timing issue that ends up in corrupting the memory and generating an erratic behaviour.
I would need quite some time to look for this bug and fix it.
Thank you,
Maurizio