I have been on Pro|E for a long time and now I am on Creo. My old Windows NT workstation use to simply quit and do a cold-crash of Pro|E. It had the simple approved FireGL graphics card and enough memory. At that time I found that it is easy to "confuse" the processor. If you -overclick- and get ahead of the processor, it just crashed. This is a holdover from the Unix days when serial processing was the only game in town and all storage media was treated the same.
Windows tried to break that serial processing by allowing certain tasks to multi-process almost from day one. Memeory, cache, and hard-drive data was one of those areas that was always multitasking. Anything ported directly from Unix tended to crash. Since the kernel of Pro|E is all unix, still, you will have these issues. It is simply our responsibility to make the process as serial as possible. I can lock up Creo in a heartbeat. At least these days, it will recover at some point 90% of the time and improving with each datecode release.
Funny thing is, if you ever worked on SolidWorks, it too has a bad habit of cold-crashing. You can even repeat it with high accuracy after the 1st time. I think it is just the name of the game with high end software and the billions of transistors that have to work in unison where you know that a tiny percentage of these switches are not "prefect".
Welcome to the forum Matthew. After all these yearof being a member, I hope you can share your insights with us on a regular basis.