That's certainly my hunch. Can't say I understand the its criteria though.
But I do suspect it has something to do with the center of something going out of the screen. I dunno if it's the center of the bounding box, the center of the mesh or the center of the GameObject. Maybe you're right, maybe there is some sort of bounding box that needs to be forced to update (or can be manually set where it causes problems). I'll have to look into it sometime.
EDIT:
Did some very light looking-into it. I suspect it has something to do with incorrect frustum culling (I'm guessing OP was using a perspective camera too, like I am).
There's some talk of having to manually set the bounds property of the mesh? I guess that's the bounding box that Unity's frustum culling uses.
I'll look into it some more when I have some time to spare.