Francisco,
Sorry about the quoting style. I am used to including the original email in my response for better context. Did not realize that would get pasted in the discussion thread. I don't have a way of editing it. If you do, please remove those prior emails in my response.
You are right. My inner query was an outer join returning 3 rows. But what I did not understand was that the NULLs in 2 of the 3 rows were different because 1 was a composite NULL and 1 was a ROW(NULL) and hence they showed up as 2 different NULLs/rows even after a GROUP BY. Tom's explanation cleared it up for me.
So no issues. Like I mentioned in another response, please close this bug report. I don't think I can.
Narayanan.