[Rant] It crashes on code that shouldn't even execute!

I’m about to hurl this computer out the window. I’ve got this one spot I’m rewritting, and now it crashes the application for absolutely NO reason. It makes absolutely no sense:

log Visible_Columns
			if (this_cell is equal to "year") then
				set contents of data cell "year" of data row id This_exact_row of source_o_data to allTagsForThisFile's CurrentID3Tag_Year
			end if
			if (this_cell is equal to "genre") then
				set contents of data cell "genre" of data row id This_exact_row of source_o_data to allTagsForThisFile's CurrentID3Tag_Genre
			end if
			if (this_cell = "album") then
				--set something to "yes"
				--log something
			end if

So I have logged: {“artist”, “title”, “year”, “genre”} (and the first two are sort of defaults, and get displayed. All is well.
Uncomment those two lines, and the program crashes.
If I change album to “COMPLETE RETARDATION”… and log something, it still crashes.
Thread 0 Crashed:
0 <<00000000>> 0xffff89ac __memcpy + 524 (cpu_capabilities.h:189)

variations on contains/equals don’t do anything, no amount of cleaning helps…

and as a Development build… its fine. FINE!!! what? Did I miss something? I have so little hair left… Apple isn’t helping.