more armies in limbo...? urgent action needed

Step through is complete, and it appears to have been caused by a broad combination of multiple things happening at the same time: 

• nightly backups running at the same time as 
• nightly cleanouts of inactives, and 
• a very large set of closely timed military and diplo engagements being processed, and
• at the same time as some fairly chunky map reading going on (still trying to assess whether this is botting or not)

Somehow we manage to find these issues that have everyone shaking their heads.  On a different issue recently we found a (reproducible) bug in .NET that has entailed us actually running our very own, unique version of the core .NET framework to enable us to continue development.  I do sometimes wonder if we're not a bit too far on the "extreme" side, but I gather a "fix for all" will make it into the next update.

On a more practical level, I can't say it can't and won't happen again, but the areas that exhibited obvious symptoms ( such as herb respawning and some armies getting stuck)  have been instructed how to bypass such an event so they now understand how to handle NULLs, even in columns that are apparently constrained to be un-NULLable.

We've also written some monitoring procedures to actively look for brief glimpses of these creatures that live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, and to alert us immediately should they happen in the future.  I can't guarantee we've got them all or are looking in all the right places, but it's a stab at it anyway.

In terms of a longer term fix, beyond the hopefully forthcoming vendor patch, there are various options we're exploring in terms of re-architecting various core components.

Many thanks for your patience, and I apologise if it got a bit technical in some areas above - I know some of you are techies, and many aren't, so I tried to balance decent answers with explanatory ones.

SC