The second issue was a complete crash when I tried to change skins while playing a track.
That sounds like it could be a bug. I'm not on a machine I can test it on right now.
I doubt many users switch skins often, and probably not while playing files back, so that might not be well tested.
The stuttering problem isn't normal, but that could be some funky ASIO thing. I'm not experienced with ASIO, so I can't really comment in detail on that part. However, the view you were browsing, just to check... You said it was a "album folder view". Do you just mean a view of Albums (tagged as such), or do you mean an actual view of a file location in MC? The stuttering almost sounds like it was building something with the view, but I'm not sure what it would have been building that could have caused a performance hit (enough to stutter playback).
Maybe thumbs, and maybe if the buffer was about to underrun or something. Jim probably has a good guess, I suppose...