I might need to pass this back to the component guys as I'm not sure exactly how the "slideStart" event is supposed to operate. What I think is happening is that:
1) The first time you click to start to drag the thumb of the slider, because it's the slideStart event, the request is sent right away upon clicking. This is before any movement has actually taken place. So the response that comes back is basically empty because nothing has really changed. When you release the thumb of the slider, no new request is sent (as it would be with slideEnd for instance) to ensure that things are back in sync.
2) The next time you click to drag, the request is again sent right away but it's now sending the information from the slider as it ended up on the previous drag. That information was never sent originally so now you have this valid change to the DOM that gets applied while you are still trying to drag the slider. The update is the whole form that contains the slider (not sure if this is intentional but the sliderEnd example does the same thing) which ends up re-evaluating the script widget code. This update while the drag is in progress looks like it causes the problem.
3) Since the update applied has now brought things in sync, the next drag takes you back to step 1.
My guess is that request needs to be sent at the end of the drag as well to ensure the client and server are sync with regards to the current state of the slider. It may be that the update of the whole form is too broad but the other sliders seem to handle it without a problem.
To test this hypothesis I added a second ajax facet to the slider:
<h:panelGroup>
<h:form id="form1e">
<ace:sliderEntry id="sliderEntry">
<ace:ajax event="slideStart" listener="$
{ajaxTestBean.ajaxEventListener}" />
<ace:ajax event="slideEnd" listener="${ajaxTestBean.ajaxEventListener}
" />
</ace:sliderEntry>
</h:form>
</h:panelGroup>
With Mojarra, this allows the slider to work normally but it does send 2 Ajax request at the beginning and end of each slide. With MyFaces, the first click still has a an issue of some kind but after that it appears to work normally as well.
Verified the behaviour as specific to MyFaces. I tried updating the MyFaces libs to the more recent ones on the trunk but that didn't help.