Regarding the crafting system crashing, it happened to me when I was using Cygwin on a Windows 7 machine. What added to the problem was not finding a way to read the stackdump file, since it was not creating a normal/proper one.
In the end I think it likely was due to a missing lib or just some oddness with Cygwin. Everything looked good, no one had any issues, so likely just a fault of mine (shock and horror, me making a mistake?!!?!?!?!?). Honestly, I would trust using it if it was something you're interested in putting into your mud.
I like the idea; crafting is probably one of the best ways to draw me into a game. However, for the story/game I had in mind, crafting probably was not one of the best ideas and can easily be exploited if not done properly.
By the way, [strike]what's your mud about and[/strike] how's it coming along?