Try the latest build. I really doubt it has anything to do with changing the number of recent tracks (as the error you quoted is an XML configuration file error, whereas the number of recent tracks is stored in the database) but the latest version has some XML parsing fixes, plus it generates more detailed error messages when an XML configuration file has errors.
If you still get errors after upgrading, click the "Details" link and post the details shown there and we should be able to identify the problem.