Joomla menu failure

What you did:

(1) Attempted to create a membership/contribution page for a fully built out and configured Joomla environment. After configuring the membership setup, I went to create the Joomla menu entry for that contribution page. Joomla > Menu > New: entered title, selected CiviCRM > Contribution Page. Image 1 was the result.

(2) After trying a variety of ways to narrow down whether the problem was Joomla or CiviCRM, I finally built an entirely clean Joomla environment (nothing but the core distribution) with a core CiviCRM distribution. I created the membership page in the same way, created a menu entry (successful in this case), then attempted to access that menu entry from the Joomla front end: Image 2 was the result.

I've been able to recreate this basic scenario/failure more than a dozen times all with one or the other results above on two different but similarly configured servers. I believe both problems are actually related to one another.

Methodology:
Installed Joomla core, completed rudimentary configuration.
Added CiviCRM core via Joomla extension install.
completed CiviCRM Installation checklist
created a new membership type
created a new membership price list
created a custom profile (added 2 fields to the name and address template and reordered fields)
created a dummy payment processor
created a contribution/membership page using the previous elements.

in case 1: Joomla> Menu > Main Menu > New: entered title, selected CiviCRM > Contribution Page. Image 1 was the result.

in case 2: Joomla> Menu > Main Menu > New: entered title, selected CiviCRM > Contribution Page, selected Membership contribution page. Switch to front end, click on newly created menu entry for Membership. Image 2 was the result.

I can recreate similar failures when attempting to create Joomla menus for 11 of the 14 possible civicrm joomla menu options listed. The only entries that didn't 'crash' were: (a) CRM Dashboard, (b) Event Listing, and (c) Mailing List Subscription.

As suggested in various CiviCRM documents, I was going to try and recreate this on the Joomla/CiviCRM demo system, but it doesn't allow for menu creations, which is where the problem shows up.

Environment:
CiviCRM 4.5.8 (and 4.5.5, 4.5.7)
Joomla 3.4 (and 3.3.6)
Firefox 36.0.1, Internet Explorer 11, Chrome 41.0
PHP 5.4.38
MySQL: 5.5.40-36.1