welp... I ended up rolling some of my users to one of the beta builds instead of release 2.6.3
http://bamboo.igniterealtime.org/browse/SPARK-INSTALL4J-604/artifact/JOB1/Instal l4j/
and... today same issue happened. I cannot recall if I killed the profile or not... i'll have to check when my users leave or before they get in tomorrow for the earliest transcript history date...
if I didn't kill the Spark profile, then this was a bad sample case since something left-over from the branded/customized TRUNK version could be causing this. If I did kill the Spark profile, then i'd be worried this is something in the TRUNK causing the issue.
I'll report back after I've had a chance to check the local machines...