I still managed to encounter a problem today in the Publisher.
I eventually tracked it down to 4 '0' sized image.tif on a page which came in with copying a table from Excel.
The thread on export to PDF crashing gave me the clue to look at Resources, and that is where I saw them, and then had to work out how to copy a formatted table without them appearing.
This turned out to be the difference between 'Advanced Metafile' Pasting which crashes, and 'Metafile' Pasting which did not.
Hope that save someone else the time and gives clues to the coders as to how to avoid it.