Yes, it should make no difference whatsoever in this part of the code...
Strange that I never got this crash, with all the intensive stress-testing I have been submitting the viewer to this past weeks...
There are missing textures, but I do get some of those too and they never caused a crash...
I see from the log that you are using the "new" (and bogus) curl version (7.54.1) instead of the old one in your build... May perhaps explain it, though I do not see how right now (there is no occurrence of my work-around triggering for the pipelining bug in the log, which would show a "Temporarily disabling HTTP pipelining" warning when it fires up).
I changed the code as follow for the next release: it should catch and fix NULL pointers: