After thinking about it while at work, I got home about 45 minutes ago and decided to check the file sizes of the initial patch install and the fresh install with patch. I noticed some irregularities with file sizes and double checked each file against the initial decompress from the patch .rar file.
Turns out my entire issue came down to an error in the decompressing stage of the patch install. My initial scripts.rpa decompress was about 3kb smaller than the scripts.rpa in the install of the non bugged I tested. I don't need to bother unpacking the scripts file in order to guess which strings were affected, the traceback tells me all I need to know.