One thing I've found with the new version's improved stability is that I actually get error messages now for crashes, whereas this was rare for me with the previous version... so there are "new" errors appearing
I'd check the RAM usage as Oshyan suggested. I have had crashes with large populations (number of objects, not size) simply because I ran out of RAM. Watching the task manager, TG crashes for me around 1.25 - 1.3Gb of RAM (I also have 2GB).
Masking the populations to remove many of the objects out of frame may help if it is (not to mention *greatly* speeding up the render).