The only way I was able to solve this (after trying very many things) was to break up my files by chromosome. This seemed to do the trick. The best guess I have is that it was some sort of memory leak in the c++ program. But I am not entirely sure.
This would not seem to solve the original question above, though.... (since that user was already running on chromosome 1 only)
What kind of format are your files in? PLINK or HapMap? Have you phased them? How are you running your GERMLINE script?