Bob,
Some quick background on this issue, it was discovered via our private Crowd instance and was never actually replicated except for on the live instance.
I was still able to work out what the fix for the issue was (see above). But the underlying problem is that XFire (the SOAP framework in Crowd) is trying to create an exception fault and is failing. So something went bad (perhaps a failed authentication) and then Crowd failed to report the problem to the client (e.g. JIRA) because it failed to create the SOAP fault.
An upgrade to the following library: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/woodstox/wstx-asl/3.2.3/ will fix this issue.
Justin
This has now been fixed for the 1.3 release. It was actually a little tricky with Maven 2