Sorry I meant to add more info before hitting the submit button.

If you select the UV screen layout and then select just the gunbelt (not includeing the bullets) it is at that point that blender will crash.

This is using the 2.57 rc2 downloaded directly from the blender.org website.

Also, I do have Firefox 4 open during this. I noticed that there were some other bug reports featuring firefox 4.

Works ok here, 64bit arch linux. gforce 6800. 4gig ram.

Before going into UV edit, could you try turning off face drawing?
Editmode -> 3D view -> Nkey panels -> Mesh Display -> Overlays -> 'Faces' (disable it)

I noticed this made it draw incredible slow since there is a large number of overlapping faces.

Loaded file, opened UV/Image editor, selected all of the belt and things display fine here. I can edit uv points, but a bit slow yes.
(OSX PPC, old ATI card 128 MB)

Common first step in cases like this is to check nvidia site for driver updates, and verify that your opengl settings are default.
You could also try on another system...

Moved from Blender 2.5 Bug Tracker to OpenGL errors