Some of them are controlled by options in the settings (catch throw, set disassembly-flavor att) and some of the others should not be user edited, because they will break debugging. (width, height, confirm)
"set debugevents on" is used only to detect the pid of the debuggee and when the pid is correctly detected "set debugevents off" should be executed.
I guess the pid reporting has changed, see the beginning of the GDB_driver::ParseOutput functions.