While going through some of my screenshots this morning, I came across this one I took a few weeks ago.
I had been using the permanent level three cleric from the Starter Pack. She had gone unresponsive in one of the quests, and we really didn't think much of it. Sometimes that's just what hirelings do. But when we exited the quest and were back in the public area, she didn't unsummon. I couldn't kick her from the party or manually unsummon her. I passed the star to my guildmate and he tried. Same thing. Then when we went into the next quest, she still didn't unsummon, so I couldn't summon her again in that quest. But it really didn't matter. We didn't need her, and we were running our last quest of the night. Quest ends, we pick up our end reward, and call it a night.
Next day, we log back on to run a few more quests, and lo and behold... The hireling is still there. And she has the star. Still nothing we could do to get rid of her. We both left that party and reformed, and I was able to summon her again without incident.