Symptoms

Deleting an issue or bulk delete issues will throw the exception There was a system error trying to delete the issue 'TST-1'

The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:

2012-08-14 10:44:28,755 http-8090-3 ERROR admin 644x3924x1 1rchhw2 176.40.188.122 /secure/DeleteIssue.jspa [jira.bc.issue.DefaultIssueService] There was an exception while trying to delete the issue 'TST-1'.com.atlassian.jira.exception.RemoveException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Issue Ranking Operation log entry found where none expected. Please restart JIRA.	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultIssueDeleteHelper.deleteIssue(DefaultIssueDeleteHelper.java:134)	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultIssueManager.deleteIssue(DefaultIssueManager.java:635)	at com.atlassian.jira.bc.issue.DefaultIssueService.delete(DefaultIssueService.java:348)	at com.atlassian.jira.bc.issue.DefaultIssueService.delete(DefaultIssueService.java:318)...Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Issue Ranking Operation log entry found where none expected. Please restart JIRA.	at com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.rank.RankDaoImpl.createTransaction(RankDaoImpl.java:79)	at com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.rank.RankDaoImpl.insert(RankDaoImpl.java:51)	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
CODE

Cause

The problem occurs when the server's locale is set to Turkish. As described on this blog, JAVA is unable to interpret the letter 'i' correctly when the locale is set to Turkish.

Workaround

To bypass this problem, set the following arguments to override the default locale used by the JVM: 

-Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US