I'm experiencing the same problem too. Deleting C:\Documents and 
settings\<your_user_name>\.fonts.cache-1 works for one single session; if the 
file exists when gimp starts up, it exits. Note that it is recreated every time 
you run gimp, so as a temporary workaround you can create a batch file to 
invoke gimp which first deletes that file and then launches the app.

Reproduced in 2.0.0 and 1.3.22. This may be a duplicate of some other bug but I 
can't find one that is appropriate. Looks like a fontconfig issue.

Perhaps someone could investigate what is actually creating the cache file. GIMP
doesn't do that, so the problem might be in whatever the win32 installers does
when starting GIMP.

Perhaps the cache file is generated as a result of the fix for bug #110798. To
me it sounds that scanning 2000+ font files would be extremely slow if not cached.

I hope I don't do anything wrong here...first bugzilla post for any program. :-
) Sadly I'm not familiar with GIMP architecture, so I can only apply general 
hacking knowledge I've gained.

After deleting the font cache file as mentioned above, it still caused errors, 
but I was at least able to capture what was being dumped to the console. For 
record I'm using Windows 98 SE, which I'm aware isn't officially supported, but 
I hope that this might be useful nonetheless (but fixing this might be 
desireable due to it's impact -- not being able to switch fonts is a big 
problem!) I'm using GIMP version 2.0.0, GTK version 2.2.4. I didn't install 
Wimp per instructions on the FAQ at 
http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/faq.html to avoid the errors.

One temporary (but quite ugly solution) I've tried is deleting font cache 
entires for fonts causing crashing in the font cache file. The GIMP didn't add 
the fonts back in (should it have?), so if I can just find a way to identify 
what fonts are causing problems then I could hack together an app to at least 
patch the file to allow GIMP to be stable. Not pretty, but it might work!

The entry for one of the fonts listed in the font cache (one apparently causing 
the problems) is:

"C:\\WINDOWS\\fonts\\ANDMOIPA.TTF" 0 904004414 "Andale Mono 
IPA:style=Regular:slant=0:weight=80:width=100:spacing=100:foundry=monotype:index
=0:outline=True:scalable=True:charset=  T!B;|U>x<e$WCdV P0oWU !BB0>!!!%#  !!
rW+     :lang=:fontversion=65536"

The dump of the console follows. There are three errors per bad font, some of 
the messages are from other fonts. It's cut off, as the Win 98 console doesn't 
scroll. :-(

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Error in FT_Set_Char_Size: 23

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from 
font file C:\WINDOWS\fonts/msgeonb1.ttf

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Unable to open font file 
C:\WINDOWS\fonts/msgeonb1.ttf for font Arial Narrow Special G1 Bold 16, falling 
back to C:\WINDOWS\fonts/VGA850.FON

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Error in FT_Set_Char_Size: 23

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from 
font file C:\WINDOWS\fonts/ANDMOIPA.TTF

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Unable to open font file 
C:\WINDOWS\fonts/ANDMOIPA.TTF for font Andale Mono IPA 16, falling back to 
C\WINDOWS\fonts/VGA850.FON

** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294334953): WARNING **: Error in FT_Set_Char_Size: 23

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101856 ***

The crash reported here may not be related to the warnings, which are indeed due
to bug #101856. Reopening until we can be sure about the cause. I'd say it may
be related to bug #132366 instead.

Since the bug reporter said that the crash happens when scrolling in the font
list, it is very certain that we have a duplicate of bug #101856 here.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101856 ***