OK, I have made the error go away but I have absolutely no idea how. But it did use your suggested line of code.
I was thinking through the sequence of events during a purchase/paypal payment/confirmation/thanks page and decided the only non-Hika code running between handing off to PayPal and sending the notification email could be our own custom plugin, which has a call for onAfterOrderCreate and onAfterOrderUpdate triggers. Now nowhere in that plugin is there a usage of JPATH_COMPONENT. In fact, the onAfterOrderUpdate only calls the DBO object and issues two direct queries to the database. That's it. Over the entire plugin, it loads the application, it loads the user and it loads the DBO. Nothing else that even uses a path as far as I know.
But putting your line
define(JPATH_COMPONENT,'hikashop');
at the top of the plugin has made the error go away.
I have no idea how or why. But maybe that will help you track down the weirdness.
I'll include the plugin file, just in case it helps.