Disk Utility erases a volume in error?

Daniel Standage describes a problem where Disk Utility in OS X erased a drive that he did not intend to erase, presumably due to a bug in the software. Here are the details:

"I have 3 separate (physical) drives on my Power Mac 9600 (upgraded to with a MaxPowr G4 450/225 card). The 1st drive is 36 GB, the other two are 4 GB drives. I was trying to make an OS 9 drive, a Classic drive, and an OS X drive. I had everything set with OS 9 (4 GB) and OS X (36 GB) and was getting ready to install 9.2.1 on the last drive. Just prior to formatting the new 'Classic' drive I renamed the 4 GB drives using the finder to avoid confusion ('OS 9' for booting into OS 9 and 'Classic' for use in OS X). My original OS 9 drive, which I used for both booting into OS 9 and also classic was named 'Classic'. The other drive was 'Untitled'. I opened Disk Utility to format the 'Untitled' drive (which was now named 'Classic'), clicked on the first 4 GB drive that appeared, verified the volume name, and proceeded to erase the drive. Upon finishing, I closed Disk Utility and to my amazement, glared at two drives on my desktop named 'Classic' - both erased and empty."

Note: We recently received another similar report, which we are now trying to track down.