When Safari 3 beta was released for Windows, I immediately tried to install it
on my Windows XP machine at work. Unfortunately, the windows beta is more of an alpha, and IMHO, should never have been
released. On my installation (Dutch Windows XP), Safari was crashing when trying to show bookmarks or add a new bookmark. A quick check revealed that the Bookmarks.plist file was missing.
As I did not have my Mac available to copy a bookmarks.plist file from, I tried to manually create an empty bookmarks.plist file, taking another .plist xml file as example, but alas, this did not work. Then I discovered a file named BuiltInBookmarks.plist inside the en.lproj folder: C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\en.lproj. This file seems to be in a binary format (not XML), which may have caused my manually crafted .plist not to work. So here's how I solved the problem:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070613010626288