The archiving artifacts didn't work before jenkins 1.486 due to https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-13202 I believe. The exception was the same.

But since ~1.486 the build just hangs on artifacts archiving, and only the following can be found in logs:
===========
INFO: test-ia64 #6 main build action completed: SUCCESS
Oct 31, 2012 2:10:04 PM hudson.remoting.SynchronousCommandTransport$ReaderThread run
SEVERE: I/O error in channel ca-build26
java.io.IOException: Unexpected termination of the channel
at hudson.remoting.SynchronousCommandTransport$ReaderThread.run(SynchronousCommandTransport.java:50)
Caused by: java.io.EOFException
at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.peekByte(ObjectInputStream.java:2553)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1296)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(ObjectInputStream.java:350)
at hudson.remoting.Command.readFrom(Command.java:90)
at hudson.remoting.ClassicCommandTransport.read(ClassicCommandTransport.java:59)
at hudson.remoting.SynchronousCommandTransport$ReaderThread.run(SynchronousCommandTransport.java:48)
==================

The build is marked as successful after manually build abortion, and an exception can be seen in the console.

The job is simple: 'echo TEST > ${WORKSPACE}/1.txt', and archive 1.txt then.
thead dump from master and slave is attached