In my opinion, this issue is not a duplicate of MC-558, which was a predictable crash in previous version of Minecraft, whereas my issue is an unpredictable crash that happens only in 1.4.6.
After further research, it seems that the problem is due to the version of LWJGL that ships with 1.4.6. I upgraded to LWJGL version 2.8.4 and haven't experienced a crash since. So, while the problem may not be with the Minecraft code itself, the entire Minecraft distribution with associated libraries is not stable on some systems.
Andy Ruse
In my opinion, this issue is not a duplicate of MC-558, which was a predictable crash in previous version of Minecraft, whereas my issue is an unpredictable crash that happens only in 1.4.6.
After further research, it seems that the problem is due to the version of LWJGL that ships with 1.4.6. I upgraded to LWJGL version 2.8.4 and haven't experienced a crash since. So, while the problem may not be with the Minecraft code itself, the entire Minecraft distribution with associated libraries is not stable on some systems.