Hey Tom,
I'm having this same problem using the Arduino Uno Rev 3. It's advertised to allow me 32kB of memory, but when I exceed ~14kB it won't work. Nothing throws an error message, but the code won't work.
I procrastinated the problem by storing a large array in the PROGMEM, which allowed me to build up to 19kB successfully, but I can add no more without inciting a crash. However, I've reached that wall again.
I tried replacing 'ld.exe' from your zip file, but it did not solve my problem. Any suggestions?