To point one thing out: it does not happen always but in far more than 50% of my attempts.
I tried waiting after the multiple On-Off-On-Switching. So I waited 5, 10 and 20seconds before clicking on "Help" but it did not make a difference. Still crashes. So as you say if something is "out of sync" it seems to stay "out of sync", waiting for something to finish does not seem to help (and my machine did not seem to be busy with anything during the waiting time. This is just my impression from "listening" - I did not check any system monitors).
Are you using the same GTK/glib versions?