Thanks for your answer. I do have version 0.6x
I wonder if the database commits are simply too close to each other? The blockchain is public information and can always be redownloaded in the even of a crash, there is really no reason to write to the disk several times per second to secure it.
The hard part is not downloading or storing the block chain. It's building, maintaining and guaranteeing the on-disk consistency of the block and transaction index that is necessary for validation.