We've just discovered that this error is actually due to the HTML Publisher plug in.
In order to reproduce, create a master / slave job that does anything (to proove this I ran a groovy script that sleeped for 30 seconds). Then have it archive an HTML report when the job is done.
After you've done those two steps, now any changes that are made to the jobs configuration will cause the current running jobs to be aborted on the slaves.
------------SLAVE OUTPUT--------------
Sleeping....
Sleeping....
Status Code: 404
Exception:
Stacktrace:
(none)
Generated by Winstone Servlet Engine v0.9.10 at Fri Apr 05 17:45:54 CDT 2013
------------SLAVE OUTPUT--------------
This is a core issue, not a configure-job-column-plugin problem.