Ethereum's execution peer set has a zombie wing
A stale execution peer is not always a node that forgot the latest fork.
Sometimes it is a modern client binary sitting at the mainnet genesis block and politely telling the world it is ready for Homestead.
Across seven complete UTC days, 201 of 1,444 discovered mainnet execution node IDs advertised old fork IDs. 164 of those had the old Frontier fork ID, 0xfc64ec04, with next = 1150000.
That is not "slightly behind."
That is genesis.