@Joelbow
It’s great that your problem is solved, but if you’d provide more detail on the “special characters” in your macro that caused it to crash, we could think about it further, and maybe learn something we didn’t already know.
shortcuts.xml can be edited with Notepad++ as long as you don’t use the Shortcut Mapper functionality to change a shortcut key assignment at the same time (during the same run) as you make other (manual) edits to the file. If you make manual edits AND also use the Shortcut Mapper to make a change during the same run, Notepad++ will (in order to update the key-combo change), write out a new complete copy of shortcuts.xml from what is currently in memory–which will not include any manual edits to the file.