Ahhh, man, I wasn't aware of this '' == 0 thing (or had forgotten Dan's posting of it earlier). Yes, it is a bug and should be reported as such.
Which brings up a point. Dan alluded to my old "postgres oddities" forum I had up a few months ago on my old P200 at home. I dropped it when Ben put up the "official" OpenACS site.
Would there be value in setting this up again? If so, it should go at openacs.org. Ben - I had it set up as an "editorial", not "Q&A" style forum in order to encourage rather complete descriptions of problems with comments appearing on their own page. The idea was to build up something like an interactive porting hints/bugs/petty annoyances FAQ for Postgres in the ACS context.