There have been a few complaints such as #9040... Maybe this helps to debug them further.
Of course this also makes it impossible to discard the "leading" zeros:
Before:
> getrawtransaction f3fe5b5c0024dbb1030edd720fc1effc306a054da5a507903e8cb5663336
< 01000000014f7...
After:
> getrawtransaction f3fe5b5c0024dbb1030edd720fc1effc306a054da5a507903e8cb5663336
< parameter 1 must be of length 64 (not 60) (code -8)