Fractional Transaction Count
Well, I feel silly. I eventually saw this again, but it said "current count = 2.266" I thought that was again strange. 

And then I noticed that 266 was the error number. Hmm. 

Facepalm

Turns out I inherited some boiler plate error handling that was appending the error number to the error message without any separation. So what looked for all the world like a wacky ms thing, was in fact a wacky construct. I must have looked at it 100 times without seeing the actual problem.