In my limited experience, MC is not a stable bit of software, it seems to crash at several times a day if I am not just listening to music. It often crashes when doing something which I imagine would take lots of processing power.
Perhaps my computer is getting too old for it? 3700+ AMD processor Nvidia geforce 6500 graphics, 2gb ram...
MC is stable on my old Athlon XP 3200+ (2 GB RAM, GeForce FX 5500). I actually use it for testing Windows 7 (32-bit). I still prefer to use XP Pro on my other machines.
It is possible that MC uses your PC extensively and exploits a HW problem. For instance, a bad memory stick is a quite common problem that doesn't necessarily always show up.
If you have MC set to automatically analyze the files for replay gain it will once decode each and every audio file in the background and calculate the replay gain info. That may cause additional resource usage and bring up an otherwise hidden problem on your system.
Some combinations of DirectShow filters (installed on the OS) and video files may be unstable. Initially MC creates small thumbnail images of the videos and to do that it must play a small cut of each video file. So, if you have imported also video files that may be causing instability. To avoid background thumbnailing you can prebuild all thumbnails: Options > Tree & View > Thumbnails > Build missing thumbnails... If you have lots of video or big image files let it run overnight.
If the instability issues do not go away we can try the logging feature, but first it would be good to find a reproducible combination of actions that always causes a crash.
... In the Auto-Import settings thing, you can choose folders you want to be included, and one of them is my mp3 folder containing all my music, and in each folder is the folder.jpg file too, but I do not want these visible as part of my image library. They are only for view as cover art when browsing music.
How would I exclude the folder.jpg images which are in the same folders as the mp3 files themselves, and exclude it only for Image browsing?
Should this not be the default anyway? Boxee, XBMC, MS MC and all other media center type software will differentiate between your photos folders and your music folders and will not add your folder.jpg images to your photo library...
Actually there is a "ignore special files (folder.jpg, etc.)" setting enabled by default. It should make MC to not import them when you don't change any default import settings.
By default a selection of various media types is ticked when a new folder is added to auto-import folders. The selection is configurable (Options > Library & Folders > Configure Auto-Import > select a folder in the list and press "Edit...")
I wonder if the "ignore..." setting actually works as it should at the moment.