Solved!
The culprit was the 'DVB drivers from the latest kernel'. I switched back to the LE Standard Driver and the kernel ring buffer (dmesg) was no longer swamped with errors. Sigh!
I think that this also was the reason for the instability as I did not see any artifacts or breaks. So beware of the new drivers at least if you have an Hauppauge WinTV soloHD or WinTV-dualHD.