What SSML is crashing VA, exactly?
All VA is doing in regards to SSML is checking if the flag is set, and if the flag is set, send the text in its entirety to the TTS engine as SSML. There's nothing going on other than that, so if there's a problem it's either going to be operator error or speech engine error (and unfortunately there's not much I'm going to be able to do about either unless I can spot a pattern). In regards to the fault file, the latest entries seem to be emitted from interaction with EDDI.