Hi Antony,
thanks for reporting!
I haven't seen the behavior you describe.
The VLR wants to first send a GSUP Update Location Request to the HLR before it
receives a reply to it. From the short logs that you sent it's hard to figure
out whether that was the case, or if not, why.
Does this happen only sporadically or do you have a sure-shot way to reproduce
the failure?
If you have an account on osmocom.org, I can enable permissions for you to
create an issue, to attach all logs and a network trace.
~N