Recently we've been working more on JRuby master, on new features and performance. With JRuby 1.6.6 coming soon and 1.7 starting to stabilize, we'll be circling back to these bugs.
I'd love to help, but my Java skills are almost none existent! If I thought I could make any headway into that bug I'd jump in - maybe over the holidays I will try and have a look.
Of course, we can always use help too :)