Yes, you should certainly try the devel_0.37 and see if it helps you out. Dealing with denormals is quite difficult, and Intel has no plans to correct this problem any time in the future, so either people have to not buy Pentium processors for audio work, or programmers need to account for this problem in their code. Since a lot of programmers I know don't have a P4 handy to test on all the time, it makes it difficult. Trust me, PD is not the only program which suffers from denormals.
there are some ways to avoid denormals ... one of them is using the simd instructions that are said to help ... i'm still experiencing denormal problems with steve harris's ladspa plugins ... if you are planing to buy a new processor for audio, stay away from intel...
btw, i don't know if this makes sense, but when used a suse linux on my machine a year ago, i could use some tools, that i can't use on my gentoo system any more (e.g. steve harris's flanger) i don't know what might cause that (it's not related to a difference in compilation ... i tried the same binaries) maybe suse is doing some fancy stuff with their glibc ... i'm still confused by that...
cheers...