Sitecore 6.5.0 update 3 Publishing emtpy items

Having converted a Sitecore 5.3.2 website to Sitecore 6.5.0 update we noticed that there were number of items visible on the website which editors had marked as being unpublishable.

It was recommend to use the following web.config Sitecore setting to prevent Sitecore publishing the empty items:

<!--  PUBLISH EMPTY ITEMS
Determines if empty items (i.e. items without publishable versions) shold be published.
Default value: true
-->
<setting name="Publishing.PublishEmptyItems" value="false" />

However, when the setting was added the empty items still were published.

Sitecore Support have recorded this as a bug and we were provided with a hot fix where by we were required to install a new dll and overwrite the following line in the website's web.config:

<processor type="Sitecore.Publishing.Pipelines.PublishItem.DetermineAction, Sitecore.Kernel "/>
 

The hot fixed prevented the empty items from being published when the Publishing.PublishEmptyItems setting was set to "false", which solved our problem, however it should be noted that we experienced that when the Sitecore setting was present in the web.config file when having the reference to the hot fix dll in the web.config Sitecore published all items with publish dates that were in the future.