Well, that would hide the bounding box (and I'm not sure if it would cause the 'ghost selection' to be dropped) but I happen to like the bounding box in general, and having to go View > Hide Bounding Box and then View > Show Bounding Box every time this happens is even more tedious than just resizing the ghost selection and undoing it.
I'm fairly certain this is a bug, and I've grown increasingly surprised and dismayed that it has gone un-fixed in successive iterations of the program. Because it's intermittent I'd like to figure out a way to avoid it, or, miraculously, keep it from ever happening again.