On both 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 I don't seem to get stop-time to work on Win7, from a command line. Start-time seems to work fine, no problem clipping the front part of a video.
The application is pretty simple, just:
vlc c:\temp\_out.mp4 :start-time=5 :stop-time=326 :sout=#file{dst=c:\\temp\\_out2.mp4} :sout-keep.
I've tried both --stop-time= and :stop-time=, and also tried leaving out the :start-time= and :sout-keep.
Start-time is perfect, but my output file consistently runs to the end of the input file, ignores stop-time.