I am still getting JVM crashes from time to time when running Idea – I am typing in Idea, and suddenly I find myself looking at my empty computer desktop with Idea nowhere to be found, and a HotSpot error log in my Idea directory. (note: I have reported these silent crashes to JetBrains in the past, but there really isn't much that JetBrains can do about them, since they're fundamentally JVM bugs and tend not to be easily reproducible.) The current (6.0.2) version of Idea seems to be using JDK 1.5 update 8. I am hoping that Sun will fix these apparent HotSpot bugs in one of their maintenance releases of the JDK such as the recently released update 10, which contains a number of bugfixes related to garbage collection and HotSpot. You can read about the fixed bugs here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/ReleaseNotes.html