The projects module is using core naming JNDI to store
and retrieve its context settings.

When the context settings names get long - e.g. 50
characters
or more, or when they contain "troublesome"
characters,
such as ".", InstanceDataObject changes the names
of the
.settings files (see its escape and escapeAndCut)
methods.
When we search for settings by a particular name
we therefore
don't find these.

The reason names may easily get 50 characters is
that to prevent
module conflicts prefixes for settings are used.
By default
we tried the settings object's classname - but
that's not
only long, it contains dots as well :)

For now we're working around this by truncating
the property
names the same way you're doing it (by duplicating
the code
on our side) but a general solution would be better.