Text help please.

[micheus]

I was going to add the last crash dump which had a lot more information but I have reached my quota of 300kb.

Yeah, the store space here offered is too short. It's more intended to share dump files which uses to be small.
As you shared images, you reach it faster.

In the Gallery section I've pined this topic: Ways to share your images

I have even discovered that by extruding the back faces of the text I can make it deeper in the panel

You can achieve that just by moving those faces/vertex too.

If you get the issue using the Arial font, please share more details about it (like size and style you used) and about so I can try to repeat here.
Is the panel just a plain cube? four faces or did you subdivided it?

Here is it using Arial Bold and a simple box:


So, that is something "special" in your model that causes that crash.