If you consider not getting a reply within a day during Christmas holidays an "abandoned project", go ahead and check if the AIMP developers react more quickly. I for one report several XMPlay bugs every year and Ian usually fixes them within a day or two. He's one of the most caring software developers I had the pleasure to interact with, and so his software is far from dead.
The crash you experienced is most likely caused by a
bad plugin (in combination with some very specific files) and probably not XMPlay's fault. When you load a big playlist, XMPlay has to re-scan all the file and during this process one of the plugins you use might be crashing. It shouldn't be related to the skin you use but of course any change in the XMPlay environment can contribute to the plugin's misbehaviour. As it's usually a very specific combination of plugins and files that cause such problems, it's hard to diagnose them, which also also contribute to the lack of responses so far.
To find out which plugin is misbehaving, you should remove all plugins and re-add them one by one until you find the crashing one. In the past the FFMPEG plugin was often found to be the culprit for such crashes, but it could be any other plugin as well. I have close to 15000 entries in my XMPlay playlist and even when reloading the playlist it never crashes, but I also only use a rather small number of carefully chosen plugins.
Anyway, why am I even writing this; have fun with AIMP. I'm sure it doesn't have a single bug
