Anyone understand this strange LR3 side panel behaviour?

Question

In the last couple of days my laptop has developed a piece of strange behaviour related to the side panels.  I'm pretty sure it didn't start when I installed the LR3.5 update, but this may have been a contributing factor.
Until recently I always worked in "solo" mode.  A couple of days ago, LR's behaviour changed so that opening or closing any of the side panels would cause the relevant side (left or right) to become totally unresponsive.  The rest of the program continued to work fine, and the equivalent side panel in other modules continued to work properly until a panel was opened or closed.
In an attempt to understand what was going on, I turned "solo" mode off.  This led to some very interesting behaviour indeed:
If I used the triangle to open or close a side panel, everything worked exactly as expected.
If I clicked on the dark grey bar to open or close a side panel, it became stuck in one of the two states.
When stuck in "open" state, clicking in the grey area simply caused the panel to close and then re-open, very rapidly.
When stuck in "closed" state, something similar happened in that the panel opened and then re-closed, very rapidly.
When in "stuck" state, clicking on the triangle had no effect on the displayed panel but it seemed to toggle the internal state between opened and closed.
Once toggled, clicking on the grey bar opened the panel where it used to close it, and vice versa.
When collapsed, the panel displays as pale grey rather than the more usual dark grey.  See below for an illustration.
I have a desktop machine as well which doesn't show the behaviour.  I've tried reinstalling LR3.5, to no avail.  My guess is that we're dealing with inconsistent panel state information in the "preferences" file, but I don't know for sure.
If anyone knows what is happening, or (more importantly) how to stop it happening, I'd be enormously grateful for some help. 
Many thanks in advance,
Ian Wilson
Cambridge UK

Answer 1

Further investigation yielded yet more interesting behaviour - and, it turns out, a pointer to the problem.
I tried renaming the old "preferences" file, causing LR to create a new one.  The problem was unchanged, apart from losing my registration information... 
I tried creating a new, virgin catalogue.  This behaved normally, so I thought I was onto something!
I tried importing a folder of pictures into the new catalogue.  The old behaviour returned.
I created a new virgin catalogue, which reverted to good behaviour.  I then imported one picture into the catalogue.  Behaviour BAD.
I then tried removing the single picture from the catalogue and restarted LR.  Behaviour GOOD!
Conclusion:  Lightroom works just fine for me providing I never put any pictures into my catalogue!! 
This got me thinking that, perhaps, the issue was related to the rendering of images.  I tried installing the latest nVidia drivers for my laptop, but this had no effect whatsoever.  Given the issue clearly related to how images are rendered, however, I wondered whether the problem could relate to colour profiles.  BINGO!!  I'd recently upgraded my "i1xtreme" to X-Rite's new "i1publish".  The profiles created with the latest software are ".icm" rather than ".icc", although this shouldn't matter (and doesn't matter to PS and Bridge).  It seems to matter to LR, however, as reverting to my earlier ".icc" profiles made everything work again just fine. 
There is obviously a bug somewhere, but it's not clear whether I should be chasing Adobe or X-Rite.  I'd welcome any comments or advice...
Many thanks for the suggestions,
Ian.