The biggest thing non programmers can do is TEST IT! One bug was found a little while ago were some coins were lost with the encryption. The more testers there is testing the encryption, the faster they can release it! Try moving money around with a few coins, pretty much try to get the client to not work as expected!
+1If you can, please help test, it really helps. Patch for wallet encryption is at: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/232
As bitlotto says, us a wallet with very few coins in it and/or run with the -testnet flag to use test network coins.