See the release notes for 1.6.17. If you're sharing userfiles, and you upgrade any of the leafs, all the hubs need to be upgraded too. It's best toupdate the whole net.
Actually, I guess the best solution, if you don't want to/ cant upgrade your whole net, then ive bots +o for the CHANNELS they need to be opped on; not global +o.
The problem is that .17 forces a +o flag to automatically imply the +l user flag (halfop) as well. This uncovered a hidden bug that had been present for a long time, where part of the code see's no difference between botflag +l and userflag +l. It was fixed in 1.6.17, but, the +l being forced for +o bots makes this bug show up on all of the older bots.
Here's what I would do:
chattr all your bots -o and -l
do a .save
set private-globals "l" in your config (that's l as in L, not a one)
give your bots +o for the channel's they need it on