No it's not limited to combat, it used to be limited to combat, but now it happens outside of combat too. But it's very easy to fix outside of combat, just closing the inventory and opening it again fixes it.
In combat when one is playing single player it's not much of an issue anymore it seems. It only seem to happen on the ship when the main character is alone (not in a party with other characters) I tried it a few times after my main character joined with others. I dismissed the others and went to pick a fight alone and then it happened again. I don't know if this bug will happen when playing multiplayer with one other player as Lone Wolves. My friend has been a little busy with other things so we haven't gotten to test that out yet.
PS.
Sorry about the large font on previous posts. ...was a bit pissed to see that the bug hadn't been fixed, it even happened on the first time I tried the game after the DE patch.
