Error 6875 : Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. Line 1, position 256.

By blurg64

I thought I would blog this so I can find it again and in case someone else runs into this issue.

Last week whilst performing a health check on a Project Server 2007 installations I came across this error which seemed to be a pretty common occurrence in the event logs.

Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.Office.Project.PWA.WSSEventReceivers.PSDBUpdater in Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.PWA,Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Additional information is below.
Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. Line 1, position 256.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

After a quick search, I found this excellent article by Julian Stevens which provides an explanation of the problem, which turns out to be that the complete websafe url of a document, including the machine name, folders and document cannot cannot exceed 260 characters by design. In this particular case, one of the project teams had become a little overzealous in the use of folders and descriptive filenames. The offending team is now rethinking their document storage and looking at using metadata instead of folders for organising their content.