The cause of this bug seems to be the OSX system spell checker; I've crashed a few applications to take a look at the dumps, and so far they common point of failure seems to be that they all have some call to something like `NSSpellChecker`.
This explanation makes sense to me because the spell checker is integrated very tightly into the user-facing text entry experience across the board in OSX. It is one of the few bits of code that could explain reliable failures across applications that we've been seeing.
I've disabled the spell checker a long time ago, but it still happens. So NSSpellCheckCheckString is still being invoked even though the spell check is not running.
In the OP for example:
This explanation makes sense to me because the spell checker is integrated very tightly into the user-facing text entry experience across the board in OSX. It is one of the few bits of code that could explain reliable failures across applications that we've been seeing.