It is not a joke - we had such scenario few years ago (it was 'gated vs Cisco and WellFreet vs Cisco'). And such scenario make Juniper back-bone a little dangerous (but I believe that JUNIPER debugged such problems long ago, so it is not a case today).

Yes this has happened a few times, also things like very long AS paths and address family interfaces would take GateD down alot. [I must confess to not have used Zebra] The fix for this that I deployed in GateD was to add large chunks of code to ignore anything that it didn't understand, some of these were complete botches but it stopped the gated.core's from appearing. Regards, Neil.