One day near the end of the trip I happened to run Gimp
  on a bunch of high resolution pictures. That very useful program
  is unfortunately Coda unfriendly, it used a lot of space for its own swapping
  under my home directory, which filled up Venus cache.

With distributed file systems, it's arguably a bug for gimp to swap
under $HOME.  How does that work if you run two gimps at once?  I
would advise figuring out how to make it use a local directory.

  13:40:15 Coda Venus, version 6.0.14
  13:40:15 /...../LOG size is 66451968 bytes
  13:40:15 Recov_InitRVM: RVM_INIT failed (RVM_EINTERNAL)

  So I had to reinit the client and lose all files on Coda I created
  or modified during the trip. (I was prepared though and had copies
  out of Coda as well)

That's the most serious bug.  I have at times grabbed bits from the
output of 'cfs ck', but after venus won't start you of course can't do that.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt_at_ir.bbn.com>