Its quite strange, actually. I have a new high end HP laptop computer. It runs Vista64 with 4gig of RAM and am loading my favorite open source tools onto it.
When it came to the Gimp, I found v2.6 and v2.4 crash on a regular basis.
Gimp v2.2.17 is rock solid.
Oh well. So much for "eye candy". If the old version works? I shouldn't complain. There must be something in one of the libraries that isn't configured correctly for the systems I've tried to run v2.4 and v2.6 on.