Blender 2.77 rc 2 Crash Bug Report Info

System Information

Operating system and graphics card

CPU: Intel® Core i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz ×8 64 bits
RAM: 11 GiB
GFX: Intel Haswell Mobile 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
Kernel: 3.16.0-51-generic #69~14.04.1-Ubuntu

Blender Version

Broken: (example: 2.69.7 4b206af, see splash screen)
Worked: (optional)

Broken: Blender: 2.77 rc 2

Date: 2016-03-04 17:08
Hash: 1e1118e

Worked: Blender 2.76b on the same platform

Short description of error

1: Clicking on 'Animation' to render the composite crashes Blender immediately.
2: Moving a node connector to another node immediately crashed Blender.
3: Changing from the Text Editor to the Node Editor resulted in an immediate crash of Blender.

Exact steps for others to reproduce the error

Based on a (as simple as possible) attached .blend file with minimum amount of steps

Initial problem: Clicking on 'Animation' to render a composite crashed Blender immediately.

Diagnostic follow-up stage 1: Try to diagnose by simplifying composite. Attempt to find where in the composite the error was occurring by removing parts of the composite. Sorry guys, I tried to work this down to the simplest node tree possible but that created another problem.

Stage 1 Result: Unable to change node hookup without Blender crashing.

			      Change connectors to directly connect the occupied node sockets of the two nodes marked by the nearby red frames.
			      Trying to do so crashes Blender.

Navigating Between Editors: Changing from Text Editor to Node Editor by clicking on the icon menu in the lower right corner of the UI pane resulted in an immediate crash.

See: