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Somewhat O.T. Note: I played around with bagginsbill's cylinder and found some interesting stuff.  I had a scaling problem exporting from an application once and decided to mess around with it while I had a cylinder guarranteed not to be generated in the suspect application.  It's slightly offtopic but, someone may get a kick out of it.

Load up the cylinder (P7 here) and use the default lighting.  Now, shrink the cylinder down to 1% scale and render.  To me, it's completely black and the shadows are all wonky.  However, the shadows work appropriately if you switch from depth-mapped to raytraced.  But, the cylinder is still black.
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Weird.  Maybe some Node-Wizard, intimate with the ways of lighting and rendering can explain this one?

It's a bug pure and simple and has nothing to do with geometry or normals. We could start another thread about it. It is unrelated to this issue.

The bug is triggered when the total volume of space occupied by all shadow casters is below a certain amount. In other words, if you put another tiny object in, but it's at least a couple feet from the first one, all is fine again.

Unless you're doing a "macro" shot of a single tiny pebble, or jewelry, this simply doesn't come up, so nobody has bothered investigating it further. If you're trying to render something tiny by itself, just scale it up.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)