challenge for total conversion gurus

[davidlallen]

I have spent about a month working on a total conversion and I am about to give up. I am not making any SDK or python changes, only XML, and the game crashes when I make simple modifications. I have written a preprocessor to catch missing references which should be caught by the game engine but are not. Still, I get a reproducible crash after changing only 8 XML files, which goes away if I change back one of the files.

Can anybody suggest a debugging technique to solve this problem? The details including a zipfile with the changes and a crashing savegame are in this post, details obviously in the rest of its thread.