Or ahem... Adobe ColdFusion. There's a reason you pay for it. lol
Seriously though, that error message is about as useless as it gets.
This is what I do when I have to debug blindly: Take the erroring code,
and a working example. Now, slowly start changing the broken code to
match the working code line by line until it starts working. STOP! The
last think you changed was (one of) the problem(s).
For you, first dump every piece of information necessary for you to
reproduce the cfquery (user name, password, SQL, data source, etc) and
paste it all into an empty test file with nothing but the final values
plugged in and see if that works. Your goal is to strip the erroring
code down to the bare bones so you can reproduce the error in the
simplest possible way. (The OpenBD people will also appreciate this
when you post this bug to their mailing list. hint hint) If the query
still fails all by itself (and still refuses to give you a useful error
message) then slowly change everything to look like one of your working
cfquery examples until it starts working.
The error is probably some arcane JDBC error or something. Also, did
you run that trace I suggested? Based on the rest of your stack you're
probably using MySQL and I really don't know what your options are.
This might help:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/making-trace-files.html
I can try to help you more, but seriously this thread needs to move on
over to the OpenBD list. One of them might already be aware of what
your problem is and can help you fix it.
~Brad