I've been trying to get async-export setup for the past day and I've found it keeps failing due to an unexpected # in the compilation script generated by org-export. After doing a little debugging I found the script contained ~(funcall '# "foo.tex")~ so at some point in the export org-mode is including an evaluated lambda when a quoted one is required. I tracked down the bug to the ~org-latex-export-to-pdf~ function and fixed it by quoting the unquoted lambda.