You'll need to increase the max_allowed_packet size in your initialization file. Here is what I changed mine to in my.ini:
max_allowed_packet=32M
The default is only 1M. I'm guessing this is a pretty common error in
this day and age of huge files, so it is unfortunate that the error
message really doesn't give any indication of what the actual problem
is, and makes it much harder to track down that it needs to be. I
wasted hours trying to figure it out. Hopefully I saved you a few 
Brad
