My Abe installation stopped updating after block 188421. (2012-07-10 11:26:50) The problem appears to be that Abe only looks at blk0001.dat by default and does not look at blk0002.dat, which my Bitcoin client created after block 188421.
Well, I had the same problem, but it turned out to be a permissions issue. I had forgot that I made blk0001.dat world-readable to be shared by different users on my system, and I had to do the same for blk0002.dat. Once I did, Abe recognized it and continued processing.
The real problem, at least in my case, is Abe's lack of error reporting for the case where blk0002.dat exists but is not readable. That should be easy to improve. But if adding a datadir row solves it for you, there must be something else wrong.
Has anyone else seen this?