Ugh, this took me forever and a day to figure out!
Everything was fine and dandy when I first installed the Picaxe programming editor, until it started to randomly crash.
I tried changing comports, reinstalling, even reinstalling the drivers (I thought it was a usb issue)
No, the program seems to take an issue with side scrolling.
I have a Dell laptop, and every time the horizontal scrolling was activated, the program would freeze my system, then about 30 seconds later, would crash.
If you have a laptop, check to make sure this doesn't happen to you! I've lost so much code/sanity from this. Either be careful, or disable horizontal scrolling.