That error was on me, I wasn't merging the master file first correctly.  I did that and tried again to merge in the Mala file and the ROMLister crashed.
The next time I tried yet again, same thing.
So I unchecked everything from the checkboxes and tried again and it worked....kind of.  I have a new xml file but none of the searches are finding anything so I'm not sure if the catver/controls files I found online are working right.  As I said, I'm a newbie on ROMLister.  I'll tinker and keep posting here if I find anything more.  I'm sure the issue is me/my data not the program.