I can't reproduce anything here at work, since we don't have libcurl
installed here yet.  In my tests, any internal exception was sufficient
to reproduce the problem.  You could try the error reported in bug
12296 (add watch expression `agent do end' in debugger and then
freeze system).  Another possibility is to quickly undocked one of
the tool bars, which often causes a crash in rev 71223 (fixed in
a later revision).

Incidentally, I can't try Windows XP at home because I cannot install 6.1.
I uninstalled Eiffel 6.0 and then tried to install 6.1.  I got a
failure trying to unregister some component (error 2909). I suspect I have to
clean up something in the registry but don't know what or how.