Objects with particle emitters unexpectedly disappearing

I have a rather complex object with 6 point lights for children, two meshes, one with a particle emitter of its own. The object also has a particle emitter, animator, and renderer. When I instantiate this object, it deletes itself after a short period of time. The thing is, I can stop this from happening by taking out a line of code:

particleEmitter.emit = false;

This is on a script attached to the parent object. Putting the line back in causes the object to disappear again. The object disappears reliably, less than a second after being instantiated, every time I run the game. Looking for a quick fix, I replaced the line with

particleEmitter.minEmission = 0;
particleEmitter.maxEmission = 0;

and the same disappearing behavior occurs. setting minimum and maximum emission to 1 fixes the problem, but my particles are noticeable, so I want them to stop appearing completely. I can't just disable the particle-related components, because I want the particles that are already visible to float off and fade away like they do when the emitter is running, instead of just winking out.

Is this a known bug? Should I be worrying about data corruption or something?