Curious. Is your US machine happen to be a Siemen's Acuson Sequoia 512? We have two sequoia, different models, and they both occasionally create bad RLE encoded images. Anyone tried just disabling RLE acceptance?
I've added the patch you've provided to my working version of DCMTK. Could you please send a sample DICOM image to dicom/at/offis/dot/de that demonstrates the behavior, so that I can test whether the patch really works. Thanks in advance.