I also get spurious VersionConflictExceptions without doing updates. I have an application that, every 5 minutes, obtains a cell feed (full projection, although I should change it to values) and processes the data without doing any edits. It has been running every 5 minutes for around 60 hours now, so that's roughly 720 updates, and out of those, I have received 2 total VersionConflictExceptions.
I no longer have the stack traces available but will post the next one. Jason
