package_id_from_package_key makes a round trip to the site node cache to figure out the package_id. Not sure why, but thats how it is. You can easily circumwent this by changing the way xotcl requests the package_id or by running site_node::update_cache with the node_id of the object = package_id from the request processor on initialization of the request processor.
I dont have a checkout of LORSM from 5.2, but in HEAD I could not find anything which could cause this behaviour. If you could specify the error a little bit larger (not only this message but the whole text from the error log) then i might be able to help more.
In general there should be no direct nsv call to the site node. In HEAD it is done using site_node::get_url_from_object_id and this should work just fine (at least the procedure should be unable to fail), but maybe you have a culprit there.
