Maybe it's important or maybe it's not, but although it crashes for me following Noga's directions, generally everything is working great.
The interesting(?) part is that if I add a Global variable, give it a suitable name and description, it doesn't crash, but the description is NOT visible in Event view (which it should) but it does show when accessing the variable from the system parameter selection list. So it would seem that it isn't quite rendering correctly for me, and as Kyatric pointed out, I'm one of those using an Nvidia.
In case it IS anything to do with the gfx card, I'm using the latest GeForce 285.58 driver for my card.