A little information for those classes that use pets and familiars. Best bet, keep your pet close, heh. Following was posted by Alan on the Developer's Corner. Scott posted this on the forums of Graffe’s and asked me to post it here as well.

Thanks in large part to the details provided by everyone in their discussions with GMs, our testers were able to reliably reproduce this today. Once we could make it happen at will, fixing the bug became a considerably simpler matter, and we jumped all over this one. The fix was patched to the test server earlier tonight. ** In the meanwhile, if you want to prevent this from happening, do not use /pet get lost to retain the familiar buff. ** The familiar can't hurt you when it dies anymore, so there's not much beyond the targetting/sound cost of keeping it alive. Again, thanks, friends, for providing the details we needed. Best, - Scott Hartsman Technical Director, EverQuest

So for the moment keep your familiar around. Thanks Scott, and thanks to those that helped us pinpoint the problem. Alan