Alright, thanks guys.

I suspected that the Everthing operator might not work on null sets, but since we cannot have a "zero" signal in the game I had expected the game to treat nulls as zeros, even though they are different things in computer speak.

Checking for null in this sort of thing may ...

Summary: The inserter with enabled condition: Everthing>3000 incorrectly evaluates to true when the chest is empty, causing the inserter to remove the first item placed in the chest.

1. What I did:
I set up a system with inerters, the circuit network, and the logistic network as in the screenshot ...