Very strange visual studio behavior with excessive white space lines

yesterday we updated a new version of some middleware we are using and had a very strange merge problem with perforce ... it created about 10-20k lines of space in one of my functions, this all compiled fine, it crashed when running the program pointing out some memory issue by tracing through the call stack I found visual studio was pointing to the debugger right in the middle of a function that had thousands of lines of space in it, removing the extra lines and recompiling fixed this issue, I'm just wondering how this is ?, there was no difference in the code and the compiler should ignore all whitespace, is this some kind of bug in visual studio?

thanks