It's been a while since I used VxWorks, but I hated Workbench as well (prefer using a plain old makefile). One of my favorite features of VxWorks was the shell you could get on a serial port. It was quite powerful, even letting you do REPL with C functions which was pretty awesome for debugging.

Another "favorite" feature of VxWorks was how they disabled floating point by default in tasks (at least on the LEON and PPC). Always led to confusion and frustration by someone new to the platform.

Interesting bug, I presume that happend even after bumping WDB_GOPHER_TAPE_LEN. I had a similar bug, where if the object file was "too large" (if you needed debug symbols...) the IDE loader would crash and you couldn't debug.