I have a 2x2 storage drawer with nether brick fences. There is no picture/icon for the fence, it is blank like it is empty. I can still and remove the fences though.

I tried putting nether brick fences in all the drawers and it seemed to show up fine. Can you experiment further?

I have made a couple rendering changes as part of the bugfix release I'm working on. You can try this build and see if it makes a difference: http://1drv.ms/1t00wPd

I tried 1.1.6 with no change. Here is a screenshot. All the different drawers have Nether brick fences and none are showing up.

I created a new minecraft instance using forge 1208 and only your mod installed. I left all settings on default (including graphical) and created a new world. The fences were still invisible. Curiously enough, however, normal fences were also invisible, although as you can see in my previous image normal fences were visible.

Since this version was in a different location (vanilla minecraft launcher instead of FTB) the files are different so it wouldn't be a corrupt file. I'm really at a loss. With and without optifine is no different. With high or low settings is no different (unless the oak fence disappearing had something to do with that).

I am running on linux but that should make absolutely no difference. I do have an older computer (+5 years old) with an old video card and it is possible that could be affecting it. Perhaps you are rendering the fences in some fasion that my old card doesn't recognize, some shader or something, that could cause it. I don't know.

If you want to send me some test program to test I will run it. I also have Intellij Idea set up for modding Minecraft if there are any tests you think I could do myself.

Do you have any other mods loaded that might interfere with or replace those fences? Or mess with fences in general?

Another observation: I had regular fences in a barrel and moved them into the same storage drawer as the nether brick fence, and it was invisible. I turned around to look at something else, turned back, and the fences were there. I turned around again and they were invisible. I moved around a bit and at an oblique angle the fences reappeared and stayed. Not sure if they will stay visible. The nether brick fences I have never seen.

I did some more testing on this. I was able to reproduce it.

I believe fences have a bugged render state. Put a fence in a drawer. It's not there. Now place a fence in the world. It comes back. Now start attaching a fence in different directions. One of the directions makes the label vanish again.

They don't vanish from item frames, so I will have to see if Mojang has any special handling they do.

I've checked in a fix for this, but it's a hack. Block objects maintain a render state based on whatever block is being rendered. When all the rendering is done, that block is left in the state of the last one. In the case of connected fences, the bounds will be different depending on how the fence was connected. The bounds are used by the drawers renderer to determine how deeply to set it (item frames are immune because they just center the block). Blocks do have a method to set a bound for item render, but fences don't implement it.

The hack then is to set the block based on state and give it dummy coordinates, such as 0,0,0. That should make sure the block is put in a state where it doesn't think it's connected. There is still some mild concern that a modded block could do something really weird, but I guess that's the best we can do.

The fix will be in the next release.