Carriage Returns in CSS files appear to interfere with Optimize CSS Files

I enabled "Optimize CSS files" on my sites admin/settings/performance page and cleared the cache only to discover that anonymous users were seeing the White Screen of Death and my apache error log recorded "child pid 2363 exit signal Illegal instruction (4)". Disabling that option restored normal operation.

I looked at the CSS files and noticed that each line ended in CRLF. I'm running Drupal on a FreeBSD server, so I took a guess that carriage return might be unfriendly. After removing the carriage returns from all the of CSS files I was again able to enable "Optimize CSS files".