There are two independent problems here. 1) The exception is caused by right-clicking in the white space of the tag browser. I can't make it happen right-clicking anywhere else. It has nothing to do with grouped searches. 2) The "creation of grouped search terms" problem has been there since forever. The search preferences didn't tell the tag browser to completely rebuild the tree. Restarting calibre fixed it.
calibre

calibre is an e-book manager. It can view, convert, edit and catalog e-books in all of the major e-book formats. It can also talk to e-book reader devices. It can go out to the internet and fetch metadata for your books. It can download newspapers and convert them into e-books for convenient reading. It is cross platform, running on Linux, Windows and macOS.
For more information, see the calibre About page.
Screenshots
Usage
See the User Manual.
Development
Setting up a development environment for calibre.
A tarball of the source code for the current calibre release.
Bugs
Bug reports and feature requests should be made in the calibre bug tracker at Launchpad. GitHub is only used for code hosting and pull requests.
Support calibre
calibre is a result of the efforts of many volunteers from all over the world. If you find it useful, please consider contributing to support its development. Donate to support calibre development.
Building calibre binaries
See Build instructions for instructions on how to build the calibre binaries and installers for all the platforms calibre supports.