We may have figured out what was causing some windows users to crash while syncing the blockchain. It was noted that if your wallet was "locked" it would sync fine and not crash.
Hypothesis: If you are running 32 bit windows on a slow computer then the user interface will be sluggish while syncing. If you monitor the memory usage you will see it grow and ultimately this will result in a crash once it hits 2 GB. The memory is growing because the CPU cannot keep up with the network. When the wallet is locked, the CPU doesn't get backlogged.
Work Around: keep your wallet locked while syncing... for now.
Solution: 0.4.11 will have a fix for this issue.
OS X and Linux users didn't see this crash because they are 64 bit.