FEFLOW 6.006 (and earlier versions) crashes under Windows 7

We are running FEFLOW on 6 identical production systems:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo 3.33 GHz CPU; 8 MB Ram, 64-bit OS Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1

For all non-trivial data sets (using the standard binaries with no add-ins) FEFLOW crashes on "Close" or "Exit" from the main menu with the error message/window:
"FEFLOW Groundwater Simulation System has stopped working"
This is annoying but not too disruptive since files can be saved prior to exit.

The same error message/window also appears almost always when the "3D layer configurator" is used and the "Apply" button is clicked.
The crash is not immediate - it seems to coincide with FEFLOW attempting to display/redisplay the mesh/supermesh windows
- and there is a considerable period of CPU activity prior to the crash.

We have an addition system used for developing interface modules:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo 3.00 GHz CPU; 8 4MB Ram, 64-bit OS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Version 2003 Service Pack 2
Identical files and data sets that crash in Windows 7 perform flawlessly on this system.  FEFLOW is very stable and predictable in the XP 64-bit environment.

We have tried without success to resolve these issues with Windows 7 for almost a year and have reinstalled the OS and FEFLOW multiple times between running some very large simulations for clients. We can't afford the time-loss resulting from these crashes and the unpredictability of FEFLOW under Windows 7.

Our problem is:
Do we wait for the Windows 7 issues to be resolved? - have others had the same experience? - can these issues be resolved quickly?
Do we revert to XP (with no continuing OS support from Microsoft)?
Do we move to Linux? will FEFLOW be fully supported under Linux? All our systems are dual boot with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed (but we can use other Linux dialects).

Any help, advice, sympathy, etc will be gratefully received.

MJR

The crashes are most probably related to the graphics card of your system. We haven't had any feedback on instabilities related to Windows 7 specifically, but most FEFLOW crashes in the 3D Layer Configurator were caused by graphics card problems. Could you please send us some details on which graphics card you are working with? Do you use different ones on your two systems?

Thanks, Julia

The problem systems have Onboard Intel GMA adapters with G45/43 chipset but we access them remotely through on lots of different machines.
The one that works is an Nvidia GForce 9600 GT adapter and works well in both XP and Linux
(once I figured out how to get aksusbd to work in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which doesn't recognize usbdevfs and /proc/bus/usb).

Thanks for the help. Can you recommend any other cards that work well with FEFLOW?

MJR

"The problem systems have Onboard Intel GMA adapters"

Unfortunately that's what we suspected. While the onboard Intel graphics adapters perform very well in most cases for standard and  Active X applications, their drivers tend to show bugs in the OpenGL implementation. We recently had to replace our set of training computers as we could not find a more or less bugless driver for their onboard Intel chipset. Sadly, new drivers do not always behave better than older ones even. We observe much less problems with NVIDIA and ATI cards. We cannot give a more specific recommendation as drivers change daily and there is a nearly infinitely large number of graphics cards on the market (some of which even use identical hardware, but different drivers).