Client Crashes when playing animations

I am currently working my stubborn butt off creating a set of 15 animations for SL. I am not very good at animating, so I tend to upload a revision, use the "Play locally" or "Play in world" buttons about 30 times apiece to try to discover what doesn't look the same in SL as it does in the animation program, and repeat again in 10 minutes.

The problem is that in the last several days, I have crashed upon hitting the "Play in world" button at least 10 times!!! The crash is always signalled by a slight pause (perhaps a second) followed by a crash to desktop.

Usually but not always this is after already having pushed the button quite a few times so that I can look at the anim from different angles. Also frequently I will already have one looping animation playing (a "ready" animation" and will then play another (an "attack" animation) when the crash occurs. Both anims are uploaded as priority four, no facial expression, fist morphs.

I've tried all the standard stuff, rebooting, clearing cache, etc.

So.... Is it just me? Are other people experiencing crashes when playing animations?

It would be great if I had a very consistent set of repro steps, but I haven't been able to make it reproducible enough to avoid the cursory "report it with a set of repro steps" standard LL response.

It would be great if more than one person with this problem could put their heads together to repro it like that thread about the texture bug did

Failing that, is there another process that the good animators use to test things in a rapid revision cycle? A process that doesn't crash all the time?

I"m not sure if it's related, but there's a crashing bug when playing anims located in the inventory of a worn attachment. I can reproduce it so I bug-reported it but obscure little things like that almost never seem to be a priority .

It's clumsy but it never seems to happen when the anim is played through script, so you could rez a prim, have it play the anim on touch and then just swap different ones in and out to test. (Or any poseball script should probably do as well really)

Yeah, I thought about that, but was really hoping to not add steps to a process that is already a pain in the rear. This would all be easier if the animations looked the same and worked the same after importing There would be half the number of iterations, but I suppose that wouldn't generate as much revenue

Nevertheless, I guess it's worth the time to drop the anims into the scripted prim rather than crash without warning.