Thanks for the response - the exact steps to reproduce the error is abit of a problem, there doesn't seem to be anything that causes the crash other than normal usage - the only recurring pattern is that Blender often crashes if there has been no activity with an open file for a few moments (for instance I get up to answer the door, or switch to Firefox to read incoming mail) and then I return to the application, perform any task, eg simply selecting an object or even just switching to Blender, it will crash and usually on attempting to open the file I was working on Blender will crash again - presumably because the file is corrupted, the only way for me to recover my work is to create a new file and append the items from the corrupted file, one by one, as invariably one of the objects will cause Blender to crash again.