Fixing permanently dead redstone torches in Minecraft?

There seems to be a newish bug in Minecraft where redstone torches burn out sooner than they ought to, and never recover. (I think I heard that this can happen if you use /time set, but this is a single-player world.) I haven't been able to find any info on Minecraft Wiki about it.

How can I prevent this from happening, and how can I repair the problem? (If I remove and replace a torch, then it burns out the very next time it toggles.)

Solution 1:

Sorry, I misread, as this time set bug annoyed me a long time on SMP server.

Known bugs on Minecraft Wiki #Redstone Torches

This is a know bug, all you can do is restarting your game. It happens sometimes on random blocks, and it will never work again on that block until you restart. It happens both on single and multiplayer, we hope it will be fixed on 1.8