Applications on SD Card disappear: Gingerbread bug or hardware error? I have an Huawei Honour running 2.3.6. I have plenty of apps installed and some I have moved to a 32GB sd card.

Now I notice that quite randomly some application that are stored on the sd card just disappear. (I am not talking about the apps become unavailable when mounting the USB file system on a PC, as that is to be expected.)

All that remains is a placeholder-icon that will be removed once I click it, and every hint that this app was ever installed is gone. I have to go to the playstore and reinstall it.

Now I wonder what the source of this problem could be. Is it Gingerbread, or a hardware error (the device itself, or the sd card)?
I've been Googling this problem for a few days now.  It appears to be based in some startup bug wherein the launcher app scans for existing applications before the SD card (internal or external) is mounted.  First off, use FileManager or equivalent to look at your SD card's contents.  If you see some grey icons with the app names or "com.[appname]" , then you're suffering from this bug.
There are a variety of work-arounds posted in various forums -- too many for me to provide links here.  Rumor has it that ICS 4.04 and JellyBean may have fixed the bug.  In the meantime, you might want to try Link2SD and/or cautious use of tools like App2SD which promise to tell the user which apps should not be moved.