I haven't set up my local development install to be able to e-mail -- I suppose that is the next step. Incidentally, I only find a handful of places that profile_load_custom_fields() is mentioned in core. It looks like it is normally called by lib/moodlelib.php, by get_complete_user_data, but I can't quite imagine why that call within the function would fail and the rest would succeed.
Granted, I'm fairly new to Moodle and don't have much familiarity with the core code. My server is pretty much vanilla aside from having added a $CFG->customfrontpageinclude, but I don't know that that would be too strange. Also, I double-checked -- my local install is 3.8.4, but my production server is 3.8.5+.
I did update my workaround as you suggest, by wrapping those two lines in if(!isset($USER->profile)).
Granted, I'm fairly new to Moodle and don't have much familiarity with the core code. My server is pretty much vanilla aside from having added a $CFG->customfrontpageinclude, but I don't know that that would be too strange. Also, I double-checked -- my local install is 3.8.4, but my production server is 3.8.5+.
I did update my workaround as you suggest, by wrapping those two lines in if(!isset($USER->profile)).