I had turned thumbnails off when Kevin suggested it to see what he was referring to, though I planned to test with them turned on first. Only I forgot to turn them back on.
So clicked the toolbar icon to insert a picture, the window popped open listing all the image files... (which is when I saw I had left thumbnails off), so clicked the + button 3x to turn thumbnails back on. The file names (fonts) became larger with each click but thumbnails did not appear, then the screen solarized and hung with an instant popup that the program crashed. (I zipped the .dmp and sent it to Kevin.)
So this eliminated updated files as fixing the problem, and as suspected, thumbnails was the key.
THANK YOU KEVIN and DIAPDEALER.
If you guys do find what causes it I hope you will still let this thread know. But it's great it can be prevented so easily by turning thumbnails off. Just to make sure, I will leave them off now and keep testing...