This is just a heads up for anyone else who runs into this problem in the future. 

Programing a Fubarino SD <512k flash, 128K ram>:

So I was trying to read a variable sized data structure into memory from a text file and I found that if I attempted to allocate more than about 2K bytes the allocation would hang up and the program would freeze. Instead of allocating memory in 1 large block I tried implementing my data structure as a link list; this would also fail after about 2K bytes were allocated program wide. Since my program was fairly small, at least in the context of listed chip memory, I figured that there must have been some sort of compiler command that limited the size of the available heap. After some research I found that MPLAB x has an option for adjusting heap size, and I reasoned that visual micro must also incorporate that same feature somewhere. I found this file:
chipKIT-application-32MX795F512.ld
and modified the value of _MIN_HEAP_SIZE to 0x8000(32k bytes) from a value of 0x800 (which just happens to be 2048 bytes)
works great now 
So if you are having issues using new or malloc() or whatever and know that you should have a large amount of memory available find the .ld file for your chip inside of your arduino packages file and edit it appropriately.