C :: Bitwise Operations On 2 Bytes In A Buffer Then Storing Result In Variable

I'm doing a bitwise operations on 2 bytes in a buffer, then storing the result in a variable. However, I sometimes get a non-zero value for the variable even though I'm expecting a zero value. The relevant portion of the code is as follows.

Code:

unsigned int result = 0;
long j = 0, length;
unsigned char *data;
data = (unsigned char *)malloc(sizeof(unsigned char)*800000);

[Code] ....

I'm expecting result to be zero when my data[j] and data[j+1] are 0xb6 and 0xab respectively, which is the case for most of the time. However, for certain values of j, my result is strangely not zero.

Code:

j = 62910, result = 64
j = 78670, result = 64
j = 100594, result = 64
j = 165658, result = 512
j = 247990, result = 128
j = 268330, result = 512
j = 326754, result = 1
j = 415874, result = 256
j = 456654, result = 1024
j = 477366, result = 512

It appears that these strange result values are all powers of 2, with a 1 bit appearing somewhere in the unsigned int.

I'm not changing the value of result anywhere else in the code, and when I print out

Code: (unsigned int)(((data[j]^0xb6)<<8)|(data[j+1]^0xab))

I get 0, but somehow when it gets stored in result, it's no longer zero. I really don't understand what could be wrong.