Yep... that would be correct and that would also be why most folks think it doesn't work in the trigger as capturing the number of rows inserted, updated, or deleted that fired the trigger.  The following does work in a trigger (as strange as it looks) if it's the very first thing in the trigger code...

CREATE TRIGGER trigger_name

ON { table | view }

[ WITH ENCRYPTION ]

{

    { { FOR | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { [ INSERT ] [ , ] [ UPDATE ] [ , ] [ DELETE ] }

        [ WITH APPEND ]

        [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ]

        AS

DECLARE @Rows

DECLARE ... any other variables you may need ...

    SET @Rows = @@ROWCOUNT

     IF @Rows = 0 RETURN

... other trigger code ...

I'd still like to see the code that caused the original problem.