Refine Edge / Drop Shadows

I'm using the Refine Edge tool to drop out backgrounds of scanned images. I scan against a black background to get the best separation with the item. It works great, but when I test it with a drop shadow, I often see this spackling when I increase the Spread feature in drop shadows. When I back off to a normal spread / opacity, they look fine.
Note I'm greately exaggerating the settings when I test, but as I sell my digital files, I need to make them as fool-proof as possible.
I've played with the refine edge settings to adjust the smoothing/contrast and contract edges. This helps, but I still get some of this effect. I am able to clean up the mask using the pencil tool where the drop shadow goes crazy.
Is this normal? Should I just advise clients to not exaggerate the drop shadow settings?
Is there anything further I need to know? I've researched the Refine Edge settings and I think I understand it pretty well.
Here's an exaggerated example:

lesnicole wrote:
It's only when I jack up the "spread" feature that I start seeing the stray pixels.
To me that says that the mask isn't perfect, but maybe off a level or two from being perfectly black.
I'll do some experimenting with this. I wonder if the Dither feature could affect it, and/or whether it could be related to color-management somehow....
-Noel

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That helps, Barabara, although I was thinking more along the lines of the edge of the image, so it looks like the image has some dimension, like the before and after pic on this page: http://www.dropshadow.net/ Thanks!
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 14:31:33 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Drop Shadow in PSE 8 or PSE 9
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if you want to put a shadow on just an object in your photo, for instance, select it with the selection tools of your choice, then Layer>New>Layer via copy and you can apply a shadow to just the object on the new layer.
>

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