The reason I did not raise a bugzilla was because the issue was intermittent ( ! ) and also I cannot share the whole application user interface with outsiders yet. Anyway, my working conjuncture is that these files are loaded from callbacks of AJAX requests and the problem happens when the callback for loading rickshaw fires before the callback for loading d3 has had a chance to fire. We ended up loading d3 manually as a workaround. But it is important to show rickshaw.js in the debugger since it enables us to set breakpoints there.
I understand the difficulty in filing bug reports on pages that you can't show people yet. If you get to a point where you _can_ show it to people (even just a limited set, not the whole world), and you're still running into the problem, the bug report would be very much appreciated.