Not sure if I mentioned this in the wiki or not, but the hud_gauges table does not report parse errors, and instead silently dies. Everything up to that point in the file will take effect though, and everything after will not be seen. Pretty ****ty I know, but no one's been able to even go back and add basic error reporting to it yet. I commented on this in a critical Mantis issue,
#1936. So hopefully someone feels like diving in and figuring out that code at some point. Error checking itself is probably trivial to add, obviously the code is aware when it decides to stop parsing the file, it just needs to report why, or at least where it did, when it doesn't finish the file.