Did you do anything about this? Did you investigate it? If you still see this problem I would like to hear about it.

We didn't do anything about it other than s/\0$// -- it was an "Oh crap, we replaced the dead server and now the app is broke" kind of situation so I did a quick fix and never got back around to digging into the problem. I'm no longer at that position or working with MS SQL Server so I can't really tell you how it stands now.