Just a side note but I found why GIMP kept crashing.  Apparently GIMP stores your profile info and older versions can cause a conflict resulting in a crash.

I went to my Users/MyId/ folder on my HD (I'm using Windows) and deleted the gimp2.8 folder, reinstalled GIMP and it now loads fine and seems to run stable thus far.

Hopefully they'll fix that in a future build so that it either properly updates the profile info or deletes it during install or something to avoid this problem.

Just wanted to pass that along.