IDL crashing badly on my solaris 8 system

[Jonathan Joseph <jj21(at)cornell.edu>]

On  2000/11/07 Peter Clinch wrote:

>> Has anyone had any problems with IDL 5.4 stability?
>
>Just installed it.  Looked in the What's New book, and XVOLUME and XROI
>look like useful thingies, so I fire them up with the example code in
>the book, and after several pages of font errors IDL crashes out with a
>core dump.  Hey ho...
>
>Waiting for RSI to get back to me, will probably nudge them later
>today.  So far, not a Big Win!
>
>That's on Solaris 8/SPARC on an Ultra 30.

I couldn't find any posted solution to peter's problem.
I am seeing what may be a similar problem.  While I haven't
personally seen a bunch of font errors printed out, one of
our student's has - probably the way I caused the crash caused
the window to be obscured so I could not read the errors.
I could not check for errors afterwards, because the crash
not only kills IDL, but it kills the whole CDE session.

I can cause this crash easily and consistently by firing up
the IDL demo:

IDL> demo

Then clicking on the "visualization" button then clicking on 
the "flythrough" button.  A big mostly blank window pops up, then
shortly thereafter, my CDE session terminates.

Here's my system info.

# uname -a
SunOS cayman 5.8 Generic_108528-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Thanks a lot.

-Jonathan