Hello,
I have now been experiencing this problem for the past 7 months (since using a PC in my current position on a Windows 7 operating system). It is incredibly frustrating! I had previously used a Mac, and continue to do so at home and do not have this problem.
Whenever I use the navigation tool in Illustrator CS6, and have done so for a sustained period of time (for example moving across 3+ artboards), Illustrator crashes without warning. I get a message window that says 'Illustrator has encountered a problem and needs to close.' Then when you press OK, it freezes and quite often I have to manually restart the PC by holding the power button down as CS6 is unresponsive in Task Manager, or I have to log out and back in again. I only realised the link with the Navigation tool after this repeatedly happened, up to 4 times a day on average and I kept a log to record what I was doing at that moment. I have only retained my sanity with the help of auto-save. Prior to this I would lose hours of work a day.
I saw on a similar thread on this forum that said the bug could be triggered by the use of a Wacom tablet (I have an Intuos 3 with the latest drivers) so I tried working with a mouse for 2 weeks and although the problem happened slightly less frequently, it still happened. Therefore I wondered if perhaps the Wacom just increased the speed of the navigator and aggravated the problem. I also read it could be triggered by an Nvidia graphics card, so I installed a Radeon HD6570 but the problem remained.
Now fast-forward 7 months and I have a whole new system, a brand new PC with 8GB RAM and 3 GHZ processor speed in a last chance attempt to rule out any hardware link. Unfortunately, it has just happened AGAIN. Now I have eliminated any link to hardware, it is clearly a software problem (Namely Windows 7/CS6 incompatibility). A similar problem has also been listed on the Adobe site in which it claimed it would be fixed with an update, but after downloading this the bug is still there.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? And even though Adobe are aware of it...when can I expect an update that fixes the problem? I can't be the only one. Any advice appreciated. Thanks