Okay, I (re-)downloaded "vlc 2.0.0-rc1 Twoflower" version from
http://download.videolan.org/pub/testin ... rc1/win32/. I'm not sure, whether this is the same version as "vlc-2.0.0-rc1-20120205-0203". I tested it both on Windows Vista and on Win XP. Here is the result:
Vista: The player doesn't really crash. It plays the video but you only get to see the first frame at best (all the other frames are dropped). When the time of the video is over, vlc still causes full cpu load on one core for a while (as if it catches up decoding the dropped frames). The memory behaviour of vlc is interesting during playback. First, vlc has a RAM consumption of about 6 MB. While the progress bar moves to the right, the memory consumption increases up to 170 MB. Then it decreases again to about 20 MB. Seems like vlc keeps dropped frames in memory until they're finally decoded after the playback time is over. When i set --rate=0.25, then I see more frames and the memory consumption reaches "only" about 60 MB peak. It is not possible to close vlc, before it's ready with this strange cleanup procedure.
XP: The player crashes like before and offers to send a bug report. This time, the bug report was succesful so it may help you. I submitted it at 18:27 in the time zone of Germany.
The VIsta computer is a real machine, whereas the XP system is simulated using VirtualBox. I can provide further details about the systems if you wish to, but I'm not sure whether this is relevant and don't wanna spam around.