priestly, I was unable to get any crash anymore, not even the one I thought I was seeing. Can you find out more? Do you get a decent backtrace when you run it in gdb?
EDIT: I am also unable to see performance problems of any kind. A quick non-representative check with the X-Com intro movie shows these numbers (highest cycles without sound dropouts):
overlay: 23000
opengl: 23000
openglhq: 18000 (78%)
surface with normal2x: 16000 (70%)
(all with frameskip=0, hwscale=3.33)
Out of curiosity, here are some alternatives to openglhq:
surface with advmame2x: 15000 (65%)
surface with hq2x: 11000 (48%, but frameskip=1)
opengl with advmame3x: 6000 (26%)
Which is all just as expected (well, that slow surface is strange, but who cares). Note that I run sound at 48kHz, ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 on Linux, Athlon64 3700+, 32bit desktop, windowed mode.
If you see drastical different performance, please test multiple alternatives ofr comparison, like I did and post it, including game(s) tested.
EDIT2: I have just checked against a clean CVS compile, and plain opengl was slower. It only made 11000 cycles using otherwise the exact same options (which is mostly expected, as multi-threading makes better use of the available hardware).