Most convertors deal with the name reduction with the Akai's well, because they have to - Akai's use the names as the referencing tool, in contrast to Giga which uses indexes (Sample 0, Sample 1, etc.)
The common thing that keeps creeping up with certain Giga libraries is that the Giga names exceed 27 chars, which screws things up when you convert them to EXS and want to use them on a Mac. (I believe VSL was aware of this and worked it out beforehand).
Akai's use 12 characters, and only a couple of the non-char type of symbols (#, -, etc.)
However, the ultimate source of the crashes is likely something else. I like King's theory, but I want to check it out myself and be proof-positive.