I just recovered over an hours worth of work (I know; should have incrementatally saved) with a glass sculpture (other forum I frequent) to much relief. What I did was right click on the GIMP taskbar icon and chosed the close all Windows option (been using Task Manager to end the locked GIMP). Well, it actually unfroze and asked if I wanted to save my work. I canceled the end task and all was recovered (thank God). Just wanted to share this for those who have Win7; if your GIMP locks up, maybe this could be a last resort/ditch effort to save your work. So happy I am.

I have had to save incrementally quite a lot lately as I have started working on larger, hi-res images. It seems that resources are at a premium, i.e. ram. Although I'm running 2.5 gigs of ram with XP, Gimp still locks up on me occaisionally. I can almost guarantee a lock up if I am zipping along and then select the brush tool having inadvertantly left the previous setting cranked up to like 7 or 8 or something. That makes the brush too large to use and maxes out my cpu usage.

I'll have to remember to try your trick and see if it works in 2.6.11 for me. When I get rich and famous (yeah, right) I plan on getting a new i7 puter with about 8 gigs of ram. Isn't there some sort of improvement to 2.8 that reduces the resource usage?

Thanks Lyle that is a nice tip.

I have 6Gs Drac. lol

I agree that it has something to do with CPU management though. I especially notice this when my email notifier (have 4 emails that I monitor this way; rarely now open the website for many of these since they are mainly junk so delete these messages using mmm too. lol) pops off that I have a new email (have set it to check once per hour because of this issue; still, if an edit happens to be at that particular time....lol). Still, I should have relied on frequent updates but it was late and I was lax.

Hope that this technique works the same in XP, but I don't run GIMP in XP and don't plan on installing it in my XP VM either.

Not as castostrophic of a loss, but this trick didn't work on another edit I just did. Oh well; back to the drawing board. lol

It should work in XP just select the window in the task bar and type ALT +F4.
That will close the Gimp program window and Gimp should pop up the save dialog.

I have been able to right click the image window and get it to close and bring up the save dialog that way also. In XP that is. So that may be another handy hint when Gimp freezes up on you.

Yes Rod; if I get lock out, I will still be trying this first for sure. Still, when I last had to do this, all that happened was that GIMP just closed. Still, if GIMP becomes unstable but not all the way, this still should be a viable option.

What i dread is that hateful "Microsoft Windows has ran into a problem and needs to close dialog"...
Then there is nothing you can do but cry.

I got that exact message yesterday and lost about 4 hours of work. I hate when that happens!

Just another observation that I forgot to mention. When this trick did work, I noticed that my Dock disapeared (easy enough to restore the Dock so it was sort of on the subconcious as far as sharing this weirdness). I wonder if it somehow is involved with the crash issue in GIMP. I don't see how since it's a static item (holds the links for my gradient, brushes, paths and a few other dialogue Windows). Just wanted to share that observation as well.

I've also noticed that GIMP's menus start to get flaky right before a lock-up. Things like drop-downs not filling in, or not being able to switch focus without going to some unrelated window first. That's when I do a save - ctrl-S usually still works even when the file menu is messed up. And if I can live without the undo history I'll simply shut down GIMP and restart it.

I've also noticed that it is more likely to crash if I'm doing a lot of fancy work with paths. Once had it crash after an hour - just as I was about to save everything. Restarted, got to the same point sooner and it locked up right at the end. The third time I saved every ten minutes and it didn't lock up.

Under Windows XP, GIMP always locked up with 100% CPU utilization and the only thing that worked for me was to go to the Task Manager and kill the process. Right clicking on the window or clicking on the task bar icon never seemed to get anywhere for me.

BKH The symptoms you describe are exactly the same as I experience. Using the Task Manager, when it fails, you can also see that the amount of ram used by Gimp and its scripts or filters does not seem to be related to the tiling size in Gimp preferences or the paging file size in Windows. This behaviour has been the same in XP, Win 7, 32 bit or 64 bit Gimp 2.4 and 2.6.
It is the reason, I am trying to switch to Ubuntu for all my tasks (I am hoping that Gimp behaves different under a Linux OS) and it is the reason I am also beginning to use Ps more and more as I keep losing work even if I save often.
I doubt that a solution is imminent or that anyone is actively looking at this as a problem as most users who do not use large images and complex image manips would see this problem.
Is this behaviour also manifested in Linux Gimp installations?

I am led to believe because of the dialog weirdness GTK has a lot to do with Gimp crashing.
Gimp is supposed to port to GTK 3 by the Gimp-2.10 release.That should be interesting as GTK 2 is completely broken.

You know ignorance is bliss Rod; now that I know, I'm even more scared. lol

Sorry Lyle didn't mean to scare you.
GTK 3 is supposed to be a better UI. So switching to 3 may be the answer.

On a side note has anyone tried using huge image composing in Gimp without adding any extra filters?
Just install a portable version and see what you can do to make it crash--in other words beat the heck/snot outta it!
Possibly some of these additions cause Gimp to act funny/crash also.

Just noticed that you said 2.10 (brain was thinking the next release of 2.8). I thought GEGL was replacing GTK anyway. Just wondering is GEGL actually GTK 3.

The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) is a programming library under development for image processing applications. It is mainly developed for GIMP in order to bring support for higher bit depth images than GIMP currently supports, as well as non-destructive editing.
GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Ahh; so GTK is how GIMP displays the data where as GEGL is engine for filters and such. I see now. Just showing my ignorance but like I always say, I learn new things about GIMP each day.

I have learned everything i know by asking.Nothing wrong with that.I wouldn't call it ignorance.