well i ran into the same error on both my old rpi b with emulationstation 2.1 i think and now with rpi2 and 2.6 installation with the same amount of roms/gamelist.xmls.. i dont really want to start fresh since its working perfectly as long as i dont add a new gamelist.xml file (or another game to a existing gamelist.xml).

i gotta test it out some more by adding more/diffrent games to my gamelist.xml files..

i just thought of something. could it be a encoding problem since i edit it on notepad++ on windows (i use utf8 without bom)