It took me over an hour and 2 BB's to figure this out for a user at my company. It didn't seem to be Playbook related as other BB's worked on that particular Playbook without issues.
I migrated the users data over to a new BB and found that it had the same issues! Lates OS, latest version of BBM and Bridge.
The only thing I could think of is that it's something in the users data. I looked at the list of BBM Contacts this user had and found a number of entries with really odd characters. Stuff like "_~@Princess@~_" but with even stranger characters not in the english alphabet. On the BB, I edited these contacts profiles and changed their display names to something plain text and re-tested. It worked!
I presume these fonts/characters that the Playbook can't display is what is causing the BBM crashing.
Iv been having this problem since upgrading to OS 2. . I have found a work around. When you get the spinning green circle, press one of the buttons at the bottom (I usually hit the search icon).. Or delete.. It seems to load my contacts when I do that. Don't close it until you're done with bbm bridge app.
Thanks for the tip. It worked for me. I had been so frustrated with this issue, but I removed/replaced all the special characters in my contact list and voila!