Would you suggest switching to the dev builds? I really wouldn't mind being on the bleeding edge if it meant getting fixes like that sooner.
How is that "huge"? It happened at most 1-2 times a year, and a simple 1 second restart fixed it -- and still left all the files you had loaded.
I say huge because it was god damn irritating. In a giant checklist of stuff I was worried about, it was always an afterthought that caught me by surprise. When the artifacting completely craps out the side bar such that the folder tree no longer updates when files change, you can't even tell if the files are still there.
EDIT: To really drive the point home: this happened a whole lot. The above is a story of woe and sadness, but the real kicker was simply the autoupdate as noted elsewhere by `jbrooksuk. For a long time I used the Soda Theme [0], one of the top packages on Package Control. It had a wierd glitch with hotkeys and would end up reloading shortly after startup. It was possible that it would garf things up even on restart as a result (possibly as a race condition such that if no updates were performed, it restarted fast enough to not bork whatever drew the iterface). I used Soda theme for years, but have recently switched to Seti and enjoy the change quite a bit.