This happens on no other application I have ever used, and it is a major pain in the ar_e, as it causes complete crash of the app and lal open docs and projects, with no auto-recovery.
Have you submitted a bug to apple? Any response?
Yes, I tried half a dozen things to workaround the problem, but all futile, not helped by the problem not being reproducible on my end, and the crash log pointing only at Cocoa framework code.
Quite ramdomly, TM simply crash when bringing up the Find/Replace dialog window and tabbing between the ³Find:² field and the ³Replace:² field.
The only workaround is to use the version of the find dialog which does not use the framework controls that I am 99% sure are simply buggy, see http://macromates.com/textmate/manual/ expert_preferences#oakfindpaneldisablehistory