Pretty sure this is going to boil down to "Don't try to run the game on a boat anchor and it won't sink".
I have old hard ware and was able to run smoothly before the 1.6.1 update using Optifine.
So whatever is causing the crash may have been there before the update and it's only showing up for me now since.. you know.. no way to tweak performance.
I updated the Java and the problem hasn't happen again.
Thank you for the very fast response.
I did not know how to phrase this one to see if it had been previously reported.