[Gimp-user] GIMP crashes intermittently & often

[David Scriven <davidwriter yahoo com>]

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