Matcaps crash Windows 7 (Blender 2.72)

Hi,

First of all I would like to apologize if this problem doesn’t belong here, I didn’t know where else other than interface matcaps could fit in; I found very little info on matcaps in my research and i am quite shaky when it comes to them.

I am experiencing an odd problem with the matcap shading; whenever I enable that matcap shading setting from the T-panel and select the matcap map, it displays in the 3D view but then Blender crashes and then windows crashes so badly that I need to cold boot!

Does anybody know why this might be happening, and any Blender-tweak to avoid such dramatic crash?

I am using Blender 2.72 on a Windows 7 Home Premium (Service Pack 1), with 12 GB of RAM AMD Radion HD 7770 4 GB (this graphics card does not support CUDA, and I do all the processing with CPU, Intel core I, 3.4 GHz). This is all the relevant information I can think of; please let me know if you need anything else.

Incidentally, I am quite intrigued by the matcap shading system (perhaps because is giving me trouble), but I could not find much information about it; I would like to use it for hard surface modeling, to see clearly problems in the mesh, but I have no idea what other uses it might have; so some little explanation, or perhaps some pointer to matcaps resources could be really useful. I searched the site, but I could not find a foundational explanation of matcaps, and certainly no reference to this dramatic problem.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Incidentally, I am quite intrigued by the matcap shading system (perhaps because is giving me trouble), but I could not find much information about it;
Matcap = Material Capture

http://cgcookie.com/unity/2013/02/18/introduction-to-matcaps-in-unity/

Hi Richard,

Thanks a million for the tip; I follow Blender Cookie quite regularly, but I missed that one; I will read through it as soon as I finish typing this posting. Any idea about the crash problem? I don’t understand enough about the matcaps effect on the system to even begin to think of a solution of complete crashing of windows by the use of matcap shader.

Thanks in advance for any help