If you did an upgrade, the regular and PDO versions of Sphider 1.5.4 may not have installed properly. You can check whether or not you are affected by checking the Settings tab on the Sphider admin page. If a version other than 1.5.4 (or 1.5.4 PDO) is reported, there is a problem. The settings table in your database is missing a column. Any downloads from this point on will not be affected.
The issue can be easily fixed and is addressed on this sphiderform post.
Sphider 1.5.3 has a similar defect and can be repaired the same way, by editing update_rollup.php and re-running. However, 1.5.3 is not so critical as no changes to the settings table take place excepting for the version number update.