LP:1007776 - mysqld crashes with assertion space != 0 when using invalid innodb ibdata1

When using an invalid innodb data file (ibdata1) mysqld crashed for me.

On Windows x64, mariadb-5.5.24-winx64.

This happened on an upgrade from 5.2 to 5.5, where I had a seemingly older ibdata1 file in the data directory, but used a custom innodb_data_home_dir previously.
Upon upgrading, without the old innodb_data_home_dir set correctly, the outdated ibdata1 from the data directory seems to have been read.

When starting mysqld, it crashed with
> 120602 11:21:08 InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 34164 in file fsp0fsp.c line 2874
> InnoDB: Failing assertion: space != 0

The full log in detail is attached.

What I would expect is not a crash, but a sane error-handling, quitting with an appropriate error being logged/printed out.