i found the moment it finishes reading the blocks and about to start the gui wallet (and probably start networking to download new blocks) is when it faulted.
if i disabled my network connection before it finished reading the blocks, it started up fine. and then
re-enabled my network connection after the wallet screen is fully up.

i run "network activity indicator" tool in my windows systray, so doing network stop/starts is fairly fussless.

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