Thanks to one of our original beta testers, Syl Arena, for pointing out that he was having crashes on Mac Lightroom v1.0 when importing over 100 or so photos directly from a CF card. Turns out, there is a bug that can cause a crash under certain circumstances when importing directly from camera memory cards. We’ve found that you should be able to avoid this problem in the short term by turning OFF the Render Standard-Sized Previews option in the Import dialog.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=kb401357
This problem will be fixed in an upcoming release.
A benefit of turning off the Render Standard-Sized Previews option in the Import dialog will generally be much faster imports. Lightroom will build and cache these previews later as needed anyway, or you can force it to build them in the Library by selecting the photos in the grid, and choosing the Library -> Previews -> Render Standard-Sized Previews menu item.