Fixed size serialization of enumerated values can result in spurious data being serialized.

[chaosape]

From what I have gathered, all enumerated types are serialized as signed integers. The mechanism for serializing an enum field uses "copyToBuffer" to copy four bytes, starting at the address of this field, into a destination buffer. Spurious data can occur in the serialization because the enum field may occupy less than four bytes in memory and, thus, some of the data in the signed integer serializing the field value may contain data from values in memory surrounding this field.