I promised to come back on this:
My friend Barend Gehrels [Barend.Gehrels@geodan.nl] also has several countires for the geographic database that CGAL fails on. You might be able to get them from him quite easily.
The counties that CGAL fails on are counties where the exterioring ring is touching itself. CGAL reports that the polygon is not strictly simple, which is indeed the case. It is accepted by other libraries (Boost Polygon, GGL, Geos, SQL Server 2008, etc) but that does not mean that CGAL is wrong here. I added an image of this into our WIKI: http://trac.osgeo.org/ggl/wiki/CgalNotStrictlySimple Besides that, I added the performance benchmark results into our Wiki: http://trac.osgeo.org/ggl/wiki/Performance, including Boost Polygon, GGL, CGAL, Geos and other libraries. Regards, Barend