Bug report #1830637 (http://curl.haxx.se/bug/view.cgi?id=1830637), which was

forwarded from the Gentoo bug tracker by Daniel Black and was originally
submitted by Robin Johnson, pointed out that libcurl would do bad memory
references when it failed and bailed out before the handler thing was
setup. My fix is not done like the provided patch does it, but instead I
make sure that there's never any chance for a NULL pointer in that struct
member.

RELEASE-NOTES

@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@ This release includes the following bugfixes:
  o free problem in the curl tool for users with empty home dir
  o curl.h version 7.17.1 problem when building C++ apps with MSVC
  o SFTP and SCP use persistent connections
+ o segfault on bad URL
 
 This release includes the following known bugs:
 
@@ -36,6 +37,7 @@ New curl mirrors:
 This release would not have looked like this without help, code, reports and
 advice from friends like these:
 
- Dan Fandrich, Gisle Vanem, Toby Peterson, Yang Tse
+ Dan Fandrich, Gisle Vanem, Toby Peterson, Yang Tse, Daniel Black,
+ Robin Johnson
  
         Thanks! (and sorry if I forgot to mention someone)