Recovering Safari crash at startup

Found that Safari wasn't starting up after one of the annoying crashes I have had lately. Google turned up an article that proposed deleting a whole host of files. In the end I just had to delete com.apple.Safari.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ and it came back to life. The file did look like it had non-ascii garbage at the front before it was deleted, but the fresh version didn't (though it had some at the end).

Had to reset home page, plus settings like opening up browser pages in a new tab, fill in usernames and passwords when known, in Safari->Preferences.