However, it never finished- it hung up on some error message before completing, and never worked.
So it downloaded almost the entire chain and got hung at the end? What happened when you restarted the wallet afterwards?
Sometimes it would immediately give another error (not sure which error this was) and close, other times it would hang during the loading process, before it even shows the wallet and block progress, and after hanging for a couple hours I gave up and force quit and tried again from a fresh new start (deleted bitcoin folder etc).
Not sure if it has to do anything with this, but when I was experiencing slow starts and hungs for a long time I used
checkblocks=50
in my bitcoin.conf
This tells the client to only check the last 50 blocks and speed up everything. 50 should also be safe even with the latest blockchain split issue, based on the recommended 30 blocks confirmation waiting time.