No comfort for you, but just to test if that is a general condition, I really bashed Genesis around for a good ten minutes with the displacement brush, no problem.
Even subdivided to 76K polys and he took it without a murmur:)
where do you have your object saved to? im on a mac and if i save to any other volume or drive other than my desk top or the volume where i have hexagon hex crashes, and what is saved is a folder not a file. if you are working from another HD or volume other than the drive or volume you have hex installed it may have something to do with that. just throwing that out there. im using 2.5.179, the latest update