neo4j V2.0.0 M5 "java.lang.NullPointerException" - nullpointerexception

Question

After upgrading to Neo4j V2.0.0 M5 I ran into the subject error when running a cypher query in my web app. To isolate the issue, I tried the following similar queries in the basic Neo4j console (http://console.neo4j.org/) as follows:
START n=node(*)
WHERE n.name ='Neo'
RETURN n
Result: (6 {name:"Neo"})
Next tested match on regular expression using "=~"
START n=node(*)
WHERE n.name =~'Neo.*'
RETURN n
Result: Error: java.lang.NullPointerException
Next tested on case insensitive by pre-pending a regular expression with (?i)
START n=node(*)
WHERE n.name =~'(?i)Neo'
RETURN n
Result: Error: java.lang.NullPointerException
And finally tested for both regex and case insensitivity with =~ '(?i)neo.*'
MATCH n
WHERE n.name =~ '(?i)neo.*'
RETURN n
Result: Error: java.lang.NullPointerException
I believe the issue is with "=~." Can anyone else recreate these errors? Shouldn't all of these queries resulted in returning the "Neo" node? If not, please let me know why.
Thank you,
Jeff

Answer 1

The great people at Neo4j tell me that this is a milestone release bug. As with all milestone releases, we were warned. Reverting back to Neo4j Stable Release 1.9.3 and will test with M6.