Database corruption on enabling devel or devel_themer?

There seem to be related reports, but not sure yet, so entering a separate issue.
http://drupal.org/node/254616 was a issue I created based on the tests I ran - going to admin/build/modules would be a risky step, and once in a while, would corrupt the database so that no page after that point was displayed - always got an "Internal Server Error", with no meaningful errors in the log.

Seems like enabling the devel_themer module always resulted in Internal Server Error. Did not see any memory exhaustion, etc message.

Could it be the main cause of the corruption? I've had similar problems with just devel enabled. Details in the issue http://drupal.org/node/254616

If this is more a devel issue and not a Drupal core issue, that would be helpful info, so I can close out the other issue.