Designing STK arenas in Sketchup

Recently i've been toying around with ideas for stk arenas. I can't stand making 3d things in blender so i use google sketchup. Quickly i found out that you can export collada files from sketchup and import them into blender. This is where i've been having a problem. For some reason it works sometimes but crashes most of the time (you know, the windows "Send error report" dialog). Has anybody else had this problem or know how to fix it? I've got google sketchup 8, free version, blender 2.6, python 3.2, and windows xp. I would really like to know why this thing won't import. I've got some ideas for arenas in sketchup but will have to see if they're any good in STK. Cheesebrother