Blender 2.46 crashing at random times

Hi, everyone. I’m having some trouble with Blender 2.46 suddenly needing to close, and I can’t figure out why it’s doing it or what causes it. I’m running Windows XP on a 2.67 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor, with 2 gigs of RAM. I’ll be in the middle of rendering, or switching into Object mode, or changing the position of a vertex, or even just changing the view, and Blender will shut down with the whole “encountered an error and has to close” dialog box. It’s a pretty new problem for me as far as Blender goes, and one I can’t find any information on. It’s happening pretty frequently, too, so I’m starting to get quite tired of redoing the bits that I lose after my last save. I do think I’m working with a fairly large model (though perhaps it’s larger or smaller than I think when compared to others)–the only layer I have activated has about 544,000 vertices. There are also several very large images UV-mapped to objects within the scene.

Anyways, any help y’all could provide would be ENORMOUSLY appreciated. This project I’m working on is a lot more fun when I don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel every twenty minutes. =P

I also have a bug to report in 2.46. Steps to recreate:

  1. Create two meshes of any kind.
  2. On the screen, layout of UI: 3D viewport on the left, outliner on the right, buttons window on the bottom.
  3. Select a mesh that you created, create a particle system and change to hair. Go through the process of refining the hair. Make it editable.
  4. Go into particle mode to refine the hair you just created. Do not switch out of particle mode.
  5. Now click on any object in the outliner - Blender crashes.