Kirk,
Well before posting today, I wanted to check things out as much as possible so as to be able to explain matters properly. I did find a series of nef files with a caption caused PM to crash when opening the Info Window, by that I mean that it froze for several minutes and would no longer respond, leaving only a shut down and a restart to settle matters. As I said before, the first time I saw this was with an ampersand and I got a solution for that from the 2010 post I mentioned so I didn't bring it up in my initial post on caption problems.
Today, I used Find & Replace to replace all ampersands in all fields in all files with "and", so normally I have no more such files to send you. As for the series I found today, they had a caption I wrote in French with some words carrying diacritical accents. It seems that this french spelling is not really the problem since I have other files with French and they cause no problem. I suspect some shenanigans from metadata writing by my previous DAM (IDI) or some inadvertent keystrokes when I was typing in the caption.
Anyway, earlier today I cleared all captions in that series and rewrote them. So as far as I know I don't have any more files which cause a crash to send you. If I find another one I will send it to you.
What I can give you is a copy of the caption I cleared form the series today;
Sculpture dite Tjenne en mémoire de Jeanne Michiels condamnée a tort au bûcher en 1667 comme une sorcière
Before writing this reply I went to a copy of another nef file opened the Info Window and pasted the above caption in. Just pasting it in in the caption field caused to PM to freeze and require a shut down and a restart.
Will this help you? Hope so.
Richard