Possible mysqli bug?

Today while I was programming I was having difficulty with some code that went something like this
$mysqli = new mysqli
$stmt = $mysqli->prepare($somequery);
$stmt->bind_param($params);
$stmt->execute();
$mysqli->store_result();
while($row = $stmt->fetch_assoc()){
print_r $row;
}
//snip

My output was strange in that the fields were present just the values were in the wrong ones and some values were missing. I did not want to bind the result because I wanted an array.

It was taking too long to proceed so I used the bind_result method. I want to investigate this further. Nothing in the php docs said this is not meant to be used this way. I found someone mention thisas a possible problem. Unfortunately it appears that someone did not investigate it

the person classified it as not a php bug. Which it may not be. Who knows?