I was wondering why you compiled 7.1.2 with BLCKSZ 16384? PG 7.1.x has tuple toaster support so you don't need BLCKSZ hacks any more
The answer is prosaic for the most part.... When I started developing OpenACS, they only had a beta for 7.1 and Roberto's fine documents indicating it wasn't necessary for 7.1 were not available. I believe the encouragement I received to use the beta 7.1 also told me to use a blocksize of 16K.