The problem witrh syncing is due to the nodes you are connecting to. This is because others have not updated and continue to use the old wallet which still tries to accept PoW block past the 50k mark.

Please try using the node i have told you since it is on the right version and is not having any sync issues.


As for the wallet crash, i need more details such as error messages, or can you post the last part of your debug.log?

Also, let it run a while, give it time to resolve, as you know there ave been thousands of nodes, so it has to work through them and find the active ones then sort through them to find the correct block number, mine took ~ ten minutes from scratch to sync.