Sorting and filtering doesn't work on custom HTML list field

After deploying a custom list today I noticed, much to my annoyance, list items were not respecting the OrderBy FieldRef specified in my view and sorting the list manually in either direction on the field in question had no effect. Worse, the Show Filter Choices menu item led to the display of a #Render Failed error message in the central pane and the Application event log and SharePoint logs reported the following:

Unknown SQL Exception 306 occured. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.  The text, ntext, and image data types cannot be compared or sorted, except when using IS NULL or LIKE operator.  The ntext data type cannot be selected as DISTINCT because it is not comparable.

The #Render Failed issue seems to be a fairly well-known bug and was apparently been fixed in the June 2009 WSS Cumulative Update although it's unclear whether that problem is related to my general sort/filter problem.

The problem field did have an edit control block attached in my case and while I expected that to be the culprit, changing the field type from HTML to text resolved the problem for me. Not my preferred approach but acceptable in this particular case.