Using digikam and KDE on W64 machine

[Ian McCarthy]

OK I give in - I've been attempting to use digikam (2.9.0) on a Windows 
7 SP1 , 64 bit machine, and to be honest the tool should do everything I 
want, but the software implementation is dreadful.
For example - If I alter the tags on a file these are set to be written 
back to the file and stored in the digikam database, Digikam says it is 
writing metadata to files, the progress line appears, progress starts 
and then it stops at some random point say 25% or 76%.
The only way out is then to use "windows task manager" to "end process 
tree" of digikam.exe followed by killing(end process tree) klaunch.exe 
and final killing kded4.exe
Then I move the library with the image which I was amending out of my 
album library, start digikam again and then move the library back in and 
start again - not really the most slick of processes. If I'm lucky this 
may work, although sometimes no images appear in which case its a case 
of killing everything (close doesn't work - it just gets rid of the 
window) and removing more libraries till it starts to work again, and 
then reintroduce the libraries one at a time, if I introduce multiple 
libraries it just gets into a mess again..
kde is at version 4.8.5
It does sometimes crash but says it has produced no useful diagnostics 
if I ask it to do a trace, so that's of no great help

So instead of just moaning about it, please would someone kind person 
tell me how to set about diagnosing what the problem really is. I would 
guess it is loosing an interrupt somewhere, so I'm prepared to go hunt 
the missing interrupt. What diagnostic tools do I need, and are they free?
Once of a day I use to be able to do this sort of thing, but I'm now a 
bit rusty, so some help to kick start me again would be a great assistance.
-- 
Cheers Ian Mac