Error messages - Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 5 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object

This happend to me when the table of the Context module was corrupt (after upgrading from D6 to D7). Uninstall and reinstall of the Context module did the trick.

Running into similar errors...

Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 337 of 365 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object() (line 815 of /mnt/stor2-wc1-dfw1/394720/www.ivaw.org/web/content/sites/all/modules/ctools/includes/export.inc).

But I don't have the context module installed.

Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 5 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object() (line 815 of /var/aegir/platforms/7/modules/all/ctools/includes/export.inc).

I do not have context enabled either.

how can I trouble shoot this?

same here. subscribing.

My actual notice is:

Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 115 of 160 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object() (line 820 of mydrupalsite.com/sites/all/modules/ctools/includes/export.inc).
Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 120 of 165 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object() (line 820 of mydrupalsite.com/sites/all/modules/ctools/includes/export.inc).

We are experiencing a very similar error, different offset, but same error otherwise.

We traced it down and figured out that it was a migration issue, unrelated to any particular module, though it could be resolved through the module. In our case, the culprit was Openlayers, but it probably exists in other modules as well.

The problem is that we moved the site from one URL to another, then used phpmyadmin to change the url of various url fields. The issue comes when the module serves the url, it has a serialized string that contains a number just prior to the url that describes how many characters comprise the url. For example, if the url in the field is http://www.example.com/images/image.png, the number in the serialized string would be 39. By changing the url programatically from http://www.example.com/... to http://www.example-new-location.com/... the number is suddenly wrong, which causes this error to pop.

In our case, we had custom markers for our maps in Openlayers, with explicit urls (as is required by the module). That caused the errors to pop every time we hit pages that had a map -- even if that map wasn't using those custom markers.

I hope this helps others. The errors disappeared just by going back into the module and re-entering the urls through the GUI.

Like JenniferRader I experienced (or more accurately caused) this error message to occur by altering a URL in my drupal mySQL database which changed its length and caused a mismatch between the actual number of characters in the string and the number stated preceding the string:
For example:
s:15:"this is correct";
s:15:"this is not correct";

My error message was Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 1665 of 1777 bytes in _ctools_export_unpack_object() (line 820 of /.../ctools/includes/export.inc).

I had been using phpMyAdmin to find an replace occurrences of my test URL and my live URL.
In my case I had made a change in a Custom Content Pane.
In the database this is held in the configuration column of the panels_pane table.
To track down the error I executed the following select statement

SELECT configuration FROM panels_pane WHERE length(configuration)="1777"
1777 is the second number in the error message.
This returned a single column from a single row containing the mismatched data.

My data cell contained several strings, so to find the mismatched data I needed to compare the count preceding each string with the characters contained within it. If you have a large string - I had one of 1578 characters - the easiest way to count the characters is to copy the text between the quotation marks (following the s:number:) and dump it into a text editor with a character count such as notepad++ and see if the count matches the number stated after the s. If it does not you have found your problem and you now need to alter either the string or or number.

I found the clue to the resolution of my problem in Swamiman's solution to “Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 10301 of 11637 bytes on views_db_object->load_row()” in stackexchange - http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/82858/notice-unserialize-funct...

One last point - I didn't discover what the offset (in my case 1665) referred to.