That is bloomin' strange....I must have pumped a couple hundred dollars in to Ms. Pac Man over the years and never once experienced that bug...
...and I can appreciate the technical explaination...and that would work if we were taking about an 8 pixel max opject....but I don't think that is the case here...anything larger than the size of the space being reported (in this case 8 pixels) would not 100% swap spaces and would therefore cause a collision detection...right?
That said, it is obviously normal behavior, but perhaps not exactly for the reason Dev stated.