Debugging strange "corrupt pack" errors on SuSE 9

A colleage at work is using git to manage code updates to a heavily firewalled machine at a client site. In a nutshell, we "push" the interesting code to a repo on usb-stick, and we pull from it on the client's machine.

We do some coding and testing on that machine, so ocassionally we bring some patches back.

Now the working repo on the client machine has started to die with "corrupt pack" errors. I am trying to get my hands on the literal error messages, and exact software versions installed. Right now all I know is that it is SuSE 9 x86, git 1.4.x, cogito .17.x . The error appears on git-diff, git-fsck-objects --full

We did bring a copy of the working copy with the "corrupt pack" to our office, and here git (v1.5.1 and 1.5.2) thinks it's perfectly well.

So I am a bit puzzled - while we try to get 1.5.x on the client machine and see what happens, is there anything that could be causing this? Any additional tests that we should run?

cheers,

martin