Freezing and then crashing...

[Douglas]

While using the airbrush, as I shift/left click to advance a line, Gimp freezes and then I have to manually crash the program, losing all my session's work. I tried waiting for it to come back, but I always have to start everything again. I use the paintbrush to avoid that. Gimp also freezes if I shake the mouse too rapidly while erasing. I can understand it's a constantly improving program, and I'm happy to be a user, so I do tolerate it to certain point. It is damn frustrating. I always have trepidation using Gimp for that reason, and I am constantly manually saving. Sometimes though, you just get focused on the task and forget to save for a while, and that's when it happens. I think the program is great, it's really helped me out working with .DDS files and creating Composites from the RGB channels, it's brilliant, but the freezing, ugh.... What can I do here besides avoid those features of the program? I have a I 7 with 16gig of RAM. The largest files were 8192 x 8192 and possibly 50 layers. But it's happend on smaller files too. Any suggestions? Thanks.