I have been experiencing a lot of crashs with 2.42a I think it has to do with when I select vertices (that’s when it crashes) so, B, go to select in box format and it dies. I’ve tried it with the simple default file and select the cube and it crashes.
First of all, make sure you get the ‘official’ blender from blender.org
I suspect it’s a driver’s fault, you can try and disable hardware acceleration for your graphic card by going into display propterty > settings> advanced > troubleshoot > move the slider a notch or two to the left.