Applications routinely crash X... how is this possible?

[Tod Liebeck <tliebeck interkinetic com>]

I've had instances where the Gimp (1.0.1 and cvs 1.1.2) and older
versions of Gnome Midnight Commander could crash X-Windows (Miguel
quickly fixed the GMC problem).  I'm very unfamiliar with the innards of
X and GTK+, but I find it odd that things are set up in such a way that
these applications can crash the X Window System.  

What happens in the particular instances I'm talking about is an
application crashes and displays a prompt to the shell that ran X.  For
example, in the version of GMC that was later fixed, after GMC caused X
to crash I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to the shell that started X and saw
this:

Archive: movies.zip
replace: AFACVC-BI? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename:

In the case of the Gimp crashes, an error of the same form was printed
in that shell.

I'd like to know if anyone knows where the root of this problem lies...
X-Windows?, GTK+?, Gnome?... something screwy on my system?  

Just thought I'd throw this in: To an entry-level windows/mac user, an
X-crash will be the equivalent of a system lock up...if it happens
they'll probably push the reset button.

RedHat 5.2, Kernel 2.0.36, Gnome 1.0.1 (rpms for rh52), GTK+ 1.2, Gimp
1.1.2 (from CVS).