Searching for this error on google and mysql.com would yield results that ranged from other helpless users asking the same question, to mysql admins posting that this is not actually a bug and there’s nothing they can do.

This error would occur sporadically, usually under heavy load and would return relentlessly. Nothing would help!
We tried all the suggestions from various sources (too many to list now), including debugging iis, windows, cleaning up after all connections to the database, mdac updates, tcp/ip ephemeral port range of windows increase, tweaking the registry, etc…

Feeling there’s nothing we could do on the web server platform, we moved on to the db servers (mysql servers 5.x running on debian).
Here we got errors like the following:

Aborted connection 887 to db: ‘abc’ user:
‘abc’ host: ’123.456.789.123′ (Got an error reading communication
packets)

We tried all the fitting suggestion on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/
communication-errors.html without a proper result.
The error returned again and again.
After tweaking several mysql config variables we finally came upon a little noticed post on:
http://themattreid.com/wordpress/?p=15

Thank you matt reid!
Increasing the max_allowed_packet from 8MB to 64 MB did the trick.
Time to celebrate.