So it's a hybrid variant or based off of the unet strain? Being you didn't say what it was, I'd be inclined to hazard a guess that it's an ircd built from bamahut and therefore still has this bad code, whatever it may be.

Given what I've seen, it has to be in the ircd source (in itself or else some library that it's calling on). To me, I can't see it being anything else as I've seen the same issue using varied clients, and when the issue occurs, it's always contained to one server even though I keep all my servers running the same source code.

Cheers,
GregMo