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[PatrikLundell]

The known sign of a save being corrupted is that at least one of the military equipment screen specific item lists have a nonsensical item in it (typically an artifact "book" with a very low item number). Thus, going though these lists and wrapping around to the end (by going upwards rather than downwards) should show you the junk items if they are present.
Thus, it's not hard to perform a manual check for the known sign (but it sure is tedious to do that again and again).

The problem here is that these lists are generated on the fly to provide data for the UI screens, and it's not known where their data comes from (i.e. these lists are not the source, but just generated to present underlying info that might be pulled from different sources). If we knew where the data came from it ought to be possible to write a DFHack script that scanned the source structures for corrupt items, and possibly even remove those items from the lists (to fix the bugged instance). I'm fairly sure the data doesn't come from the "normal" item lists identified by DFHack, as the corrupt items haven't showed up in them when a known corruption is present.

The crash itself happens when DF evaluates equipment for militia, so if you disband all militia and never assign any ever again the bug (itself) should not affect you. Assigning specific items does not prevent whatever processing that causes the crash from happening (a guess is that this processing is an attempt to compare the equipment, trying to accessing item fields that do not exist in the items that shouldn't be there, like e.g. the race the equipment is made for).

[Leonidas]

Based on watching some of Kruggsmash's videos, it seems like you can indeed take over the world with an army of less than 100 dwarves.  In 'Scorchfountain Ep.11: Pyroclastic Flow' he sends out a lot of missions and clears several sites using just a few squads, even splitting his forces up on multiple simultaneous missions.  Later in the series, he appears to have just about totally conquered the world.  At 24:46, he shows a view of the civilization screen already mostly conquered.  And in 'Scorchfountain Ep.9: Tumbling Towers' starting around 25:20 you can see a video montage of many successful raids. 

There's a big difference between "successful raids" and "conquering the world", which Kruggsmash touches on in that portion of the video. He notes that he has been wiping out many tiny villages of a goblin civ with site populations up to forty. But conquering the goblin capitol with population 10,000 he descibes and "insane", and he leaves it for later. If he does find a way to defeat that site in fortress mode with 100 dwarves, I would love to hear about it.

That's a great video series, though. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Schmaven]

He does actually conquer that site in one of the episodes, and ends up eradicating probably 90+% of all hostile sites.  So while he did stop short of world domination, it does prove it possible.

Though it may be impossible in practice right now due to the raid equipment bug.

[Bumber]

The problem here is that these lists are generated on the fly to provide data for the UI screens, and it's not known where their data comes from (i.e. these lists are not the source, but just generated to present underlying info that might be pulled from different sources). If we knew where the data came from it ought to be possible to write a DFHack script that scanned the source structures for corrupt items, and possibly even remove those items from the lists (to fix the bugged instance). I'm fairly sure the data doesn't come from the "normal" item lists identified by DFHack, as the corrupt items haven't showed up in them when a known corruption is present.

Is this something Toady might be able to answer in FotF?

[PatrikLundell]

The problem here is that these lists are generated on the fly to provide data for the UI screens, and it's not known where their data comes from (i.e. these lists are not the source, but just generated to present underlying info that might be pulled from different sources). If we knew where the data came from it ought to be possible to write a DFHack script that scanned the source structures for corrupt items, and possibly even remove those items from the lists (to fix the bugged instance). I'm fairly sure the data doesn't come from the "normal" item lists identified by DFHack, as the corrupt items haven't showed up in them when a known corruption is present.

Is this something Toady might be able to answer in FotF?

Well, Toady obviously have access to the code showing which structures DF uses to populate the UI lists. Whether he'll be able to described what these structures are in a way that allows the DFHack experts locate them is another matter. You're free to ask the question, though. It's probably a couple of months before Toady gets to the game killing bug fixing phase, assuming he'll get to it before release.