I second that motion. 
A long time ago I entered a Feature Request to do a quick "project scan" for things that would cause rendering to fail. This would be one example.
I don't expect any pre-scan would be perfect, but it seems that in 30 seconds it could check for several known failure modes without actually rendering. Sub-menus that aren't linked from any other menus, and a few things like that could be caught programmaticaly.
The pre-scan could be done every time (a good investment of a small amount of time), or it could be a button on the Make Movie tab. That way if you have merely made some small change and are re-rendering a project you know to be good, then you could skip the pre-scan. But that only makes sense if a scan takes more than an minute.
Wouldn't it be nice to take a few seconds to know that your 3-hour render might fail?