Must be something else wrong. In my environment, the {$:item.url_alias|ezroot} always appends a root folder too much when creating the nice url. So I get
www.myhost.com/root/root/....
instead of an appropriate
www.myhost.com/root/...
I guess there's a destructive interference with caching, because I get yet another /root/ appended each time I press a link with the nice url operators behind ;-). Thus, after having pressed the link 4 times, I see the curious thing