I can confirm it still exists in 13w10a - I used my setup from my previous comment, and at first it Seemed like it worked well, but in reality the order just changed a bit – previously all of the items would disappear after the first coal finished burning. Now, when the first coal is inserted by the hopper the inventory will clear, and then the setup will (presumably) work fine after that.
If I use my setup, fill the top chest with ore, wait until the furnace is full with 64 ore, then put all of my coal into the left chest, all the ore will disappear and the furnace will look like it's smelting when in fact there's no ore in it.
Here's a video: http://youtu.be/vc1b6l79bJM
(By the way, my setup does not have comparators)
Hope this helps!
I discovered this glitch when I tried to set up an auto-smelting device in my survival world. (in 13w09c) Then I reliably duplicated it in my creative world. I built a set up like this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/57010123/2013-03-02_11.58.22.png
I filled the top-most chest with logs (to make charcoal) and the left chest with charcoal (to power the furnace).
I came back a few minutes later, and I had 7 charcoal in the output (bottom most) chest, and nothing in any of the other chests.
I've tried several things, and it seems that the glitch only appears when built in this order:
first place the top chest, furnace and bottom chest (not the left chest.) (I did this against a cobblestone wall)
After placing the chests and furnace, place the two vertical hoppers (I shift-clicked on the bottom of the chest and furnace to place them)
place the chest directly left of the top hopper
Place the hopper connecting the left chest to the furnace (Usually I would do this by shift clicking on the bottom of the chest, but then it didn't look right, so I would break it and shift-click on the side of the furnace instead - not sure if this makes any difference)
Place a stack of fuel in the left chest and a stack of smelt-able items into the top chest
Right after the 8th ingot/item smelts (before it can be transferred into the chest by the hopper), the inventory gets deleted. If you are looking in the furnace at this time, the furnace interface closes, just like this bug, although my steps to duplicate it are different.
This video tries to explain what I did and exactly how to reproduce the bug: http://youtu.be/xbciast0XiM
At first I thought the furnaces only glitched when facing a certain direction (furnaces facing north), but later I duplicated it many times, in all different directions.
I've tested this under Windows 8 with Oracle Java and under Linux Mint with openJDK - same results.
This happened to me too. It might be related to MC-57163 in that there are invisible blocks, but it might not be. Here, we don't see "model: IDUNNOMYNAME:x("
Anyway, this happened to me as well. While digging downward, I reached a point at which all blocks were invisible. The invisibility persists even after breaking a few invisible blocks and going down farther. Pressing F3-a resolves the issue.
I have an NVIDIA gtx 560, but I am not sure I have the latest driver.