Crash while populating chucks without any blocks. I believe its crashing when it tries to place a tree, and there is no block, and just void.
Gives error of: "Ticking memory connection" If joining the world, and trying to load those chunks, and gives error of: "Exception ticking world" if you join in world away from chunks, and you walk/run/fly to the chunks that it is trying to populate.
The attached are a few of the crash reports from this. You will see that they either give the error of "Ticking memory connection" or "Exception ticking world".
You may notice: some are in 14w11b, and others are in 1.7.2, and others in XRay, that is 1.7.2, with the xray mod. World is "PVP World" this is the world i am making a large donut shaped pvp arena that is floating above the void.
I fixed the problem by putting a layer of bedrock under the entire arena with mcedit. After i did this, the world would load those chunks just fine.
While searching the web, I finally found this bug report and it appears to be what I'm seeing:
Description: Exception ticking world
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: n must be positive
...
I encountered this error when playing a custom map (Vechs' Sunburn Island Super Hostile) and have downloaded other custom maps (Vechs, Sethbling, etc) and had them all crash with the above error when nearing the map's border with what seems to be all 1.7.x clients, including 1.7.10. I was able to approach the map borders under the 1.6.4 client without crashing.
I know this is not the best bug report, but the OP appears to already have a handle on the cause and reproduction of this bug. Seeing the low "votes" on this issue and what appears to be no hurry to fix it, I wanted to let you guys know the kind of impact this has. [Minecraft] Map makers have all been doing the same thing in that they take a map and customize it and then create some type of border that usually involves removing all blocks and possibly replacing them with something like bedrock. This bug affects users trying to play these custom maps with a 1.7.x version and I had to search pretty hard to find this bug, but found several hits of flustered users crashing all types of custom maps when approaching the map's borders and most of them sounded like typical end users who wouldn't even know what an issue tracker is, let alone how to search or submit to one.