I don't know if Gapps are kernel-depentdent (can be, because of libraries). If you have little bit of time and patience, you can make nandroid backup and try to install the latest Gapps from Cyanogen to see, if it works (or just unzip the apk's from archive and install them, but this needs more memory and no new libraries will be installed, which can also cause problems). There can be one more problem (I don't know which phone do you have) with memory, old phones (Like my G1) sometimes don't have enough memory to install full pack, so "tiny" is needed to save space (it doesn't contain CarLocator, GoogleGoogles and other newer apps).