You have GOT to be kidding me.
The problem was a warning I saw a few times and ignored: "blackslash and newline seperatedby space". I didn't know what that meant and it looked like the newlines in my assembly code were all fine, and it was just a warning so I looked elsewhere for the problem.
But apparently that was the problem. This damn thing cares if there are INVISIBLE SPACES after that frigging backslash.
So apparently all the code examples I pasted that weren't working had some of these invisible spaces in there, and even though what I could SEE looked virtually identical, it wouldn't compiled because of those damn spaces.