Lucky indeed, I've seen similar parsing issues destroy torny tables :D
Thank you for the assistance, my experience here has been better than most.

I learn't a valuable lesson today, never overlook anything. No matter how trivial it may be. 

So, I did as you advised, uninstalled, ran CCleaner, no joy. So I did a complete clean with CCleaner after another install. Nothing.
I wondered if my MS account was corrupt as I've been having issues with rebuilding my local network (with local domain) and HomeGroup (That I chuck on general shares for the home) So I completely reinstalled Win10 (not from a backup image) Still I was unable to load Skirmish past 45%. 
I figured I'd read the output.log once again just on the off chance it was a different issue. I'm not the best coder in the world, but I can read most langs even if I can't write in them, so most of what I was seeing made sense. Until I saw my username. . . The }{ is made up by curly braces (as I have used on this forum in my user also) But for some reason I read it as unescaped. It was openlined (not encased in denoting '' for a string and not val or var) so I changed my user name (nothing else was changed at this point, literally retried to run WFTO, read output.log, changed name, reload) And VOILA! Complete load and in map in less than 3 seconds. 

Could you please try and reproduce and patch this please, I'm quite attached to my use of the braces, weird I know. But as they aren't escaped, well, I wont say anymore as you'll know the potential this may hold. Feel free to censor and/or delete this post for those reasons.

Same result. *Cries a little*

I'm not a prolific coder by any means but logs left me head scratching too.
Tbh I had overlooked AV conflicts, I'll disable and test now. I'm using Avast for clarity.