Hi Noel,
i could not reproduce with the same table, indexes and inserts outside of the main application. The real world application has hundrets of tables, so currently i cannot say what i need to add to the testcase.
But i did a quick sampling with jvisualvm.
t1.jpg shows Version 1.4.197 using a lot of time in comparing Strings.
t2.jpg shows Version 1.4.196. The inserts where done very fast.
stack1.jpg and stack2.jpg show 2 random Stack Traces of the running Version 1.4.197.
Hopefully that helps