I actually did that at one point to get some funds that were sent to the old wallet by accident.  The thing is it didn't fix my issue the client still crashed, even when done on a separate computer.  I don't really understand why that would happen.  I would have thought the keys are either good nor not good and wouldn't affect the performance of the bitcoin client.

Looks like I will probably have to give it a try.  I was hoping the transaction history was stored in plain text in a file in my .bitcoin folder somewhere for easy copy pasting.