I've kludged around the first offender, where an unregistered file type loader function vector was called, but then it didn't go far and died somewhere else after complaining about a failure to load some file. I've tried again with packed data enabled, to no avail... etc..
I wonder if that thing has been tried on a x86-64 box ;) Sadly, there's no ia32 SDL lib on my system and i can't cross compile it to ia32.