I’ve noticed a couple of times while making my game that sometimes looking things up in lists seems to fail. Then I’d stuff around with the list or change something, then it would work. I kept assuming I’d typo’d or formatted wrong, etc.
Today it happened again - I had an action meant to give a particular message if the noun it’s acting upon on is listed in the Table of Unbudgeables, but it was failing to match some objects while succeeding with others.
While playing around, I took one of the objects that wasn’t being matched, cut it from position 9 in the list and pasted it at the top. Then I recompiled and the whole list worked. I didn’t change anything else.
The item name is ladder1. I have a few object names with numerals grafted on like that. Is this likely to cause buginess? I just wondered if it might be the source of my table problem. Or if I’m just not supposed to do that in the first place. Or if I have discovered a bug, 'cos I guarantee I changed nothing but the position of the item in the list.
Can you post your tables? There are some bugs or mystifications involving the way Inform tries to assign kinds to columns (like 444 and 448; maybe you’re running across a similar issue, where a different type is inferred depending on what the first entry is.
I did see a decent number of table weirdness bugs listed. Thanks for pointing out those 2 in particular. It’s unhelpful of me not to be helpful when requesting help, but I don’t want to dump my tables here for now since it would be like an inventory dump of my IFComp game 
After I got the table that prompted me to write this topic to work (by moving a different entry to the top) I went around and checked that all my ‘listed in table’ incidences were working in full, and they seem to be.
The safest workaround seems to be specifying the type of each column with the column:
[code]Test is a room.
Jerusalem is a thing.
Table of Ages
item (object) comment (text) age (number)
yourself “As lovely as ever.” 64
Jerusalem “Seen its share of troubles.” 6000
When play begins: If Jerusalem is an item listed in Table of Ages, say “Jerusalem is perhaps [age entry] years old.”[/code]