Reading in Planet File - Aborted Core Dump

This problem may have been cataloged before so I'm posting in case there are continuing problems with osm.pbf planet files or to get help discovering any problems on my end.

My setup:

• Machine
• Windows 7
• 32 GB RAM
• Intel i7-3740QM 2.70 GHZ processor
• 236 GB disk space
• 64-bit
• VirtualBox
• Version 4.3.4
• Linux 2.6 (64-bit) running Ubuntu 12.04
• 24 GB RAM
• 620 GB disk space
• osm2pgsql command: osm2pgsql --slim -d gis -C 18000 --number-processes 3 planet-latest.pbf

What happened:

While following the Manually building a tile server directions on switch2osm all steps up to the planet file import completed successfully. However, towards the end of Processing: Relation (47800 3.66/s) I got the following error:

osm2pgsql: PolygonBuilder.cpp:261: geos::geomgraph::EdgeRing* geos::operation::overlay::PolygonBuilder::findshell(std::vector<geos::operation::overlay::MinimalEdgeRing*>*):Assertion 'shellCount <=1' failed. Aborted (core dumped)

I downloaded the planet on December 10th (with command wget http://planet.openstreetmap.org/pbf/planet-latest.osm.pbf) and started the import the same day. Have problems been reported with planet-131204 (or was a different file planet-latest.osm.pbf on the 10th)? Could it be a problem on my end?

Thanks!