ORA-7445 in alert log, due to FRM-40735 ORA-01001 in Projects Quick Entry form

Yesterday, I discussed with Akhilesh about an issue being faced in one of the production instances, which has started logging ORA-7445 errors whenever projects quick entry form is accessed which throws FRM-40735: ON-ERROR trigger raised unhandled error: ORA-01001. We analyzed the trace files generated by ORA-7445 :

ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [drurnew()+184] [SIGSEGV] [Address n
ot mapped to object] [0x000000040] [] []
Current SQL statement for this session:
INSERT INTO PA_PROJECT_CTX_SEARCH (PROJECT_ID, CTX_DESCRIPTION, PROGRAM_REQUEST_
ID, PROGRAM_APPLICATION_ID, PROGRAM_ID, PROGRAM_UPDATE_DATE, CREATED_BY, CREATIO
N_DATE, LAST_UPDATED_BY, LAST_UPDATE_DATE, LAST_UPDATE_LOGIN) VALUES (:B2 , :B1
, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, FND_GLOBAL.USER_ID, SYSDATE, FND_GLOBAL.USER_ID, SYSDA
TE, FND_GLOBAL.LOGIN_ID)
----- PL/SQL Call Stack -----
object line object
handle number name
3ec258df8 5 CTXSYS.TEXTINDEXMETHODS
3ec258df8 625 CTXSYS.TEXTINDEXMETHODS
----- Call Stack Trace -----
calling call entry argument values in hex
location type point (? means dubious value)
-------------------- -------- -------------------- ----------------------------

A query of ORA-7445/ORA-600 lookup utility revealed that this is a known bug # 5587976. This bug is triggered by a bad return from some NLS functions. This fix signals such
problems as an NLS error rather than causing the process to dump.

However we are still exploring why this error is not occuring in Production support instances and have asked Oracle to explain the bug in more detail.