Safari crashes on launch w. "attempt to insert nil"

Question

Safari 1.3.2
-[NSCFArray insertObject:atIndex:]: attempt to insert nil
Context: We've been having trouble for a few days with the status line saying "completed 1 of 3"... "completed 48 of 50" and then just not getting anywere. Attempts to wake it up by placing cursor at end of URL and pressing return, or clicking on page refresh would fail at same place or earlier. Resetting Safari seemed to help for a while. It was fairly consistently happening on certain sites (e.g. www.marketwatch.com, but also google, yahoo...).
Suspecting someone was riding on our wi-fi and generating enough extra traffic to mess up the timing of transactions, I secured it with TKIP WPA password and that seemed to work for a day or so. I was using it at 05:00 but at 12:30 nothing was working. Pings were working, DNS lookups were usually working. The ISP says they can see through to the DSL modem. I reset the DSL modem and router to factory defaults, then re-established settings that had been working, earlier. That let me get this far with IE. Now, IE 5.2.3 lets me in, but grumps about certificates, and crashes every 3-5 pages.
At one point, getting back to Safari, thinking the preferences (.plist) were being clobbered I moved Safari's preferences (Bookmarks, Downloads, History and com.apple.Safari), but that made no difference, so I brought them back.
What have I overlooked?
jgo456 yahoo . com

Answer 1

sftp from Terminal is also broken, not getting to the point of asking for pw...
but ftp works.