One additional bit of info... it appears my "fix" doesn't really fix anything. While it worked for me fine in testing, a friend zoned in and was running through the script, got to that Kildrukaun split quest::say and crashed us both. I was just within ear shot, wasn't doing the quest.
Forget if I mentioned, there were no logs of these events either - anywhere, not even App log of the system. Odd... anyway. The "new fix" is to split the line into two $text checks completely. That seems to have it stable for now.
Is this a client-side bug? too much data? Or is some packet coming from Emu that's blowing the client up? I might have to check this script in Live, see if it even works there.
Thanks for your patience reading this.