ok, the wallet does not seem to have very good error handling for forks. The default seed node (DNSSeed) that the linux client chooses is running off of a fork it seems. this fork has somewhere in the region of 60k-70k blocks. the real chain has about 135k blocks at the moment.

When the client first connects it does so to the wrong fork. As soon as it then picks up one of the nodes on the correct fork, it downloads a block and does a coredump because of bad DB integrity I think. Either way, a workaround is to run the linux client daemon with the -seednode switch and to set the max number of connections to 1. This way you can specify a seednode from the correct chain and force it to download all the blocks from the correct chain.

I will have to fiddle on the code and see if some better error handling can be stuck in to deal with this situation. A coredump is no way to deal with a forked chain!

At least for now, people can run the linux daemon or qt wallet if they want to.