Unless this is new in 1.0.2, then I don't think this is correct. Although SPIT updates the progress bar, it seems to have no effect on anything else.
Other possible causes of misc. crashes I have come across are:
Any wrong or missing spins (as noted in the above posts)
Ship percentages in a system not adding up to 100% (EV-Edit does this a lot)
Engaging a quicktime movie which has dependencies or is set to High-Quality, or where the system heap is not big enough (eg, you've assigned too much memory to EVO)
Plug Checker will identify almost all of the crash-causing bugs, and is well worth the download. The current version is for EV and EVO, although I don't believe it's been updated to accommodate extra 1.0.2 stuff. BTW, the guy who made it also did Clavius. Kudos for both.
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M A R T I N T U R N E R