I am running a BOINC grid with one application that has about 100 different executables / dlls contained within it, and more being added every week. Last week, after adding a few more files to the mix, I noticed all the clients had stopped crunching. After doing some digging into the database and log files, I noticed that there appears to be a hard limit of 64KB on the size of the xml_doc field in the app_version table. Anything beyond that is simply truncated, which causes the xml file (I believe it becomes the app_info.xml file on the clients) to be "invalid" and fail to parse thereby producing the no app version error on the clients. Apparently, when I added those new executables it had pushed the size of the file/field over 64KB.
I do not see any reason for this limit, since the xml_doc field is of BLOB type, so I am classifying it as a defect.