Wouldn't that be better suited for the official forums than this bug tracker? Also, this seems to be in the same spirit as the Block Update Detectors and is likely to be left in intentionally.
I have had similar experiences, and yes, even an unremarkable flat wall will do that.
I've had this issue and it seems to be related to having a slow or occupied processor on the client or server side. It happened to me in 1.2.5 when I was hosting the server in use as well as running Minecraft.exe on the same computer but at the time I had several other programs open that were using up my RAM and processor power. I now run minecraft with little else open and no longer have this issue.