But I find if I type one character at a time, and let the program update the results before typing the next character, I can usually search without crashing. Usually...
If you can make a smaller subset that crashes on search, I'll take that.
Another thing that could make it hard to replicate what you're seeing is if your system is way faster (or way slower) than mine. I've got a 6 month old Mac Mini i7 with SSD drive, 4gb ram. What are you running?Does pretty much any group of characters typed into the search box cause a crash?
Give the latest build a try. It should work ok now, but your large field values (i.e. Lyrics) may be truncated and you'll need to do an "update library from tags" on them. From now on, nothing should get truncated.