Regarding the crash on switch library, I was able to reproduce it in a 32bit win xp VM. The problem seems to have been in the sqlite wrapper (apsw) that the new db uses, it was out of date in the 32 bit calibre build. Updating it seems to have fixed the crashes, at least, I can no longer reproduce them.
The updated windows 32 bit builds are at:
http://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/betas/ as usual