the command line options mention a -checklevel  parameter.
I've been passing 0 assuming there'd be little to no verification, but it's happened a few times that when I open the official binary (while not doing development) there's some sort of database corruption and Bitcoin-Qt needs to reindex blocks on disk, a process that can take probably a whole day.

how do you guys develop the UI and avoid these issues?

Cheers,
Angel