this has most definitely happened to us as well, or at least something similar
we encoded our project using encoder 1.0 or 1.1 (not sure which right now), and we were using php 4.0.5 & 4.0.6 (load balanced system, so version differed from machine to machine) with the appropriate optimizer.
recently, we started reinstalling a bunch of the servers, and of course decided to go 4.1.1 (which, at the time was the latest php release).
said & done, everything was installed, but something caused php/optimizer to choke on encoded code when we were using the newest optimizer & php along with 1.0 or 1.1 encoded projects.
after trying to fix the whole thing for pretty much a day, we decided to plug 4.0.6 with the appropriate optimizer onto the machines, and everything worked fine.
my personal guess is that this has something to do with using a newer version of the optimizer against older versions of the encoder... now we just have to re-encode a few hundred files and retry 😛
if anyone knows of another solution, please do post it...
