In TextureManager there is a function called MakeProgress which is part of the texture caching system. It creates a new (empty) texture pointer and calls TextureConverter.Poll.
Sometimes this polling fails internally and gets correctly reported to the caller - which then tries to read properties of the empty texture pointer and is then in fact trying to read data of a nullptr what causes a complete appcrash.
TextureConverter.Poll actually fails for me at least one time per launch when the antivirus solution "G Data Internet Security" is activated and the cache completely cleared. A very similar problem in another file is described in D1274.
- As this only happens at texture conversion, this is just a bug faceable in SVN builds, since releases got precached textures -