[bornagainpenguin]

This doesn't look like a skin issue... Did you try with Confluence?

Yep, do not see this behavior at all.

UPDATE: Just had a thought so I set vsync to always and restarted Kodi. (Usually I set that to only while playing videos.) So far I've played videos almost two hours now and have not had the volume persistence issue since. Doesn't mean that it's gone altogether (I did say that it was inconsistent, did I not?) but that may be the direction to look in if anyone else runs into this issue.

Have yet to stream anything but again I'm not seeing any circle\buffering since then so I'm hoping that I've solved my problem. Will update if I discover otherwise.

UPDATE II: since I enabled vsync to always on the problem has been eliminated.