The pcre.backtrack_limit option (added in PHP 5.2) can trigger a NULL return, with no errors. The default pcre.backtrack_limit value is 100000. If you have a match that exceeds about half this limit it triggers a NULL response.
e.g. My limit was at 100000 but 500500 triggered a NULL response. I'm not running unicode but I *guess* PCRE runs in utf-16.