menulibre and alacarte crashes after menu edit

After using alacarte to add a new menu entry, both menulibre and alacarte do not run. menulibre draws a window outline and disappears. alacarte simply thrashes the hard drive and nothing appears. Removing /home/.config/menus/ allows them to work again.

I was not sure whether to attach the alacarte or menulibre system information, sorry if I have got the wrong one, I can forward the alacarte if requested. I have saved a copy of the menus folder which I can forward as well.
During all this time the Applications Menu and Whiskers menu worked fine in the Panel and retained their menu entries and structure.

I maybe at fault in how I used the Menu editing programs (my stats will show I have only had the system up and running for 4 weeks, status==newbie) or it maybe a bug. Since the first time the menu editing crashed, and I recovered it, I have successfully added extra items to the menu, but I have also had it crash twice since then as well. Each time deleting that .config/menus/ folder got it working again and stable as long as I was modest in what I attempted.

The last time it crashed I was trying to add an Icon to a menu entry that did not get an Icon when it was installed.

/home/rob/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu is quite short about 400+bytes and when it crashes there is a file about 16kbytes long (this file contains a whole list what looks like every possible menu item, visible and invisible, in the machine, the short file version only contains information relevant to the last icon created).

lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release: 14.04

rob@DesktopUbuntu:~$ apt-cache policy menulibre
menulibre:
  Installed: 2.0.3-1
  Candidate: 2.0.3-1
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.3-1 0
        500 http://mirror.as24220.net/pub/ubuntu-archive/ trusty/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

rob@DesktopUbuntu:~$ apt-cache policy alacarte
alacarte:
  Installed: 3.10.0-1ubuntu2
  Candidate: 3.10.0-1ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 3.10.0-1ubuntu2 0
        500 http://mirror.as24220.net/pub/ubuntu-archive/ trusty/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: menulibre 2.0.3-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-24.47-generic 3.13.9
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-24-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3
Architecture: i386
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Tue May 13 11:06:37 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-04-18 (24 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release i386 (20131016)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: menulibre
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-04-18 (24 days ago)