can't log in, crashed 4 times now. Anything I can do to get around it or shall I stop trying? lol

What kind of errors are you getting?

Minecraft has crashed!
----------------------

Minecraft has stopped running because it encountered a problem.

If you wish to report this, please copy this entire text and email it to @.
Please include a description of what you did when the error occured.



--- BEGIN ERROR REPORT a1dce528 --------
Generated 19/02/11 17:23

Minecraft: Minecraft Beta 1.2_02
OS: Windows XP (x86) version 5.1
Java: 1.6.0_23, Sun Microsystems Inc.
VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (mixed mode), Sun Microsystems Inc.
LWJGL: 2.4.2
OpenGL: GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2 version 3.3.0, NVIDIA Corporation

java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 84
at java.lang.String.charAt(Unknown Source)
at nh.a(SourceFile:152)
at nh.a(SourceFile:119)
at pe.a(pe.java:198)
at ll.b(SourceFile:346)
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.run(SourceFile:705)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
--- END ERROR REPORT 177253f4 ----------

i got that also, and then minecraft.net went down, its there problem.
Edit: it should work now.

Note. May be chance, but both times when I opened a single player world first, then tried to connect caused it to work.

That looks suspiciously like the error you get when you have a colour tag somewhere that isn't followed by any text (eg. in a chat message)

Ok. 4 times it has worked first time for me.

Just start/load a singleplayer game before attempting to join the server.