The preceding exchanges between you and Rob does I think point to the problem - perhaps to summarize:

• ActiveState builds 817 and below (ppm3) use summary.ppm and searchsummary.ppm files, if they are available in a repository, to provide a list of ppm packages; ActiveState builds 818 and above (ppm4) use a package.xml or perhaps package.lst file for the same purpose. These are there to speed up searches, as otherwise ppm will build up a list of ppd files manually, which is slow over the net for large repositories.
• The trouchelle repository, from looking at the timestamps of the various files, appears not to be updating these summary files for some reason; for example, the ppd package for Devel-Timer has a timestamp of 14-Aug-2007, but the searchsummary.ppm file has a timestamp of 09-Feb-2007. This explains the version mismatch you discovered.
• Furthermore, there does seem to be a problem with the ConfigReader-Simple file in particular, which is empty; in most modern browsers, it should display the information (eg, see Config-Yacp). This is the cause of the not a PPD and not a file error.

There's not really much you can do from the client side to fix these problems; informing Serguei, as you've done, would be the best course of action.

Update: Both the problems with ConfigReader-Simple and the update of the package.xml file have now been fixed in the trouchelle repository.