Aperture Crashes While importing iPhoto 11

Question

Hi all,
I hope someone can help as I'm getting desperate. I have spent hours on the phone with Apple tech support to no avail.
I have an iPhoto library of 45K photos that I am attempting to import to Aperture 3. However, Aperture repeatedly crashes before completing the import. This happens at different times in the import (sometimes after importing 100 or so events, other times >300 events, but it never makes it to the end.
So far, I have tried the following (each time into a new Aperture Library):
1. Duplicated and rebuilt the iPhoto library with command-option (crashed).
2. Shift opened Aperture to disable background processing (still crashed).
3. I tried importing a few events at a time, but with 45K photos that required the patience of job which unfortunately I do not have.
I am running on Aperture 3.1.1, iPhoto 11 (ver 9.1.1), OSX 10.6.5, on a 2.66 Quad Core Xeon MacPro with 8 GB ram and 6 TB hard drive space.

Answer 1

I figured out a "work-around" and I was able to import my iPhoto Library into Aperture. But in order to do it, I had to break up the iPhoto Library and import year-by-year, with each year going into a different Aperture Library. Most of the years imported without an issue, but there was 1 set that crashed a couple of times, so I assume that that's where the problem was.
At any rate, now my iPhoto Library is entirely converted to Aperture, but in 6 different Aperture Libraries with all the photos residing within the Aperture Libraries themselves. Is there a way now to consolidate them into 1 Aperture Library? Or do I have to create a 7th Aperture Library and import them in 1 by 1?
George