Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP crashes intermittently & often

[Gary Aitken <gimp dreamchaser org>]

On 02/03/15 19:06, David Scriven wrote:
> Dear All, I'm using GIMP (2.8.14, downloaded from your site) on two
> Windows 7 x64 machines (both fully up-to-date). Both have antivirus
> software and Office 2010 with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. installed
> and active. On numerous occasions and while GIMP is being used
> Windows issues the message "GIMP has encountered a problem and must
> close". This usually occurs when one or more Office 2010 windows are
> also open. For example, a colleague working on machine (#1, 4 cores,
> 8 GB memory, HD Intel graphics)  found that bringing an open Excel
> window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP was sufficient to
> crash GIMP and cause this message. (this is consistent and has
> happened many times). This has only just started occurring  -
> previously the user on machine 1 had used GIMP for the same task
> without problem (update to Office causing the problem??). I have now
> encountered the problem on machine #2 (16 cores, 64GB memory,
> high-end NVIDIA card) using GIMP and Powerpoint simultaneously,
> although I have not been able to identify a precipitating event that
> causes this.
>
> I have tried increasing the memory available to GIMP in both machines
> (via Edit/Preferences) but to no avail. The error message is
> virtually meaningless.  The crashes are frequent enough (about 1
> /hour) that is extremely irritating, never mind the loss of time and
> work. Any ideas? David 

What do you mean by
 "bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP"?
How are you trying to transfer the data (presumably an image) from GIMP
to Excel?

It sounds like you are not doing anything with GIMP leading up to the crash.
i.e. it has been sitting idle for some time.  Is that correct?

How much swap space (paging file size) does the system have?  Is it set to
fixed limits, or to "Let Windows Manage My Virtual Memory"?  How much free 
disk space is there?

It sounds like you are bumping up against some system resource limit, but
which one is hard to tell.  Is there anything in the system error log?

Gary