After upgrading to Sun JDK-1.6.0_04 I stated getting bogus IllegalStateError exceptions on a method that was annotated not to return null even though actual values were not null.
I have rectified this case as far as I could and attached both java source and class file generated by IDEA with "Add @NotNull assertions" option turned on.
This code works fine with JDK-1.6.0_03 and earlier. It fails however when attempted to run under JDK-1.6.0_04:
I was able to reproduce this error with both 64 and 32 bit JVMs but it appears to be specific to Linux platform only.