$path_class causing 404's when they include "www"

I've been spending some time on my site optimizing everything recently. I noticed there were occasionally some 404 items in my logs that were like "menu-path-www.example.com". On looking into this further, I found that Nice Menus innocently creates this path as a class on each menu item, and some "unknown" browser reads it as an actual link.

Here's the technical rundown:
For each link that Nice Menus generates, it adds a class like this:
<li id="menu-##" class="menu-path-[path-to-link]"><a href="path-to-link">Link Text</a></li>
When you create a link to another site in your menu, you might end up with the following:
<li id="menu-230" class="menu-path-www.example.com-somefolder-somefile.htm">...

Even though this is just a class, some browsers read it as an actual link and attempt to fetch the link at
http://www.yoursite.com/menu-path-www.example.com-somefolder-somefile.htm.

Note that this only happens when there's a "www" in the path. For example, if the link points to "http://subdomain.example.com" (where "subdomain" is anything other than "www"), there won't be an error.

Code Fix:
The easiest fix for this is just to blank out $path_class entirely (since I can't imagine a good use for it anyway). To do this, add the following to your template.php:

function phptemplate_nice_menu_tree($pid = 1, $menu = NULL) {
  $menu = isset($menu) ? $menu : menu_get_menu();
  $output['content'] = '';

  $output['subject'] = check_plain($menu['items'][$pid]['title']);

  if ($menu['visible'][$pid]['children']) {
    // Build class name based on menu path 
    // e.g. to give each menu item individual style.
    foreach ($menu['visible'][$pid]['children'] as $mid) {  
      // Strip funny symbols
      $clean_path = str_replace(array('http://', '<', '>', '&', '=', '?', ':'), '', $menu['items'][$mid]['path']);
      // Convert slashes to dashes
      $clean_path = str_replace('/', '-', $clean_path);
      $path_class = '';
      if (count($menu['visible'][$mid]['children']) > 0) {
        $output['content'] .= '<li id="menu-'. $mid .'" class="menuparent '. $path_class .'">'. menu_item_link($mid);
        $output['content'] .= '<ul>';
        $tmp = theme('nice_menu_tree', $mid);
        $output['content'] .= $tmp['content'];
        $output['content'] .= "</ul>\n";
        $output['content'] .= "</li>\n";
      }
      else {
        $output['content'] .= '<li id="menu-'. $mid .'" class="'. $path_class .'">'. menu_item_link($mid) .'</li>'."\n";
      }
    }
  }
  return $output;
}

That code is copied directly from nice_menus.module 5.x-1.4 with the only change being $path_class = '';

I would recommend that the module developer remove $path_class entirely from the code since I can't really think of a good reason anyone would want to base a CSS class on a path (particularly because paths may change whereas ID's always stay the same).