Infinite Illegal Operations on Exit

For the last several versions of SmartFTP (for at least a year), I received an Illegal Operation message as I exited the program, if I had connected to any FTP site during that session. I could live with that (it happened up through version 970) because I would just click OK once on the I.O. dialog. But then with 973 (and also with developer build 974.9) I get an I.O. upon exit and when I try to close the Illegal Operation dialog, I immediately get another I.O. dialog. The only way to get out of the infinte loop is to do a hard reboot (I can't even do a normal shutdown or restart or even Ctrl-Alt-Delete). I am using Win98se. The program works fine until I exit, but this problem is very annoying -- I regret upgrading!

SMARTFTP caused an invalid page fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 018f:bff9db61.
Registers:
EAX=c00309c4 CS=018f EIP=bff9db61 EFLGS=00010216
EBX=0249fe28 SS=0197 ESP=0239fdac EBP=023a0048
ECX=00000000 DS=0197 ESI=00000000 FS=4e27
EDX=bff76855 ES=0197 EDI=bff79198 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
53 8b 15 e4 9c fc bf 56 89 4d e4 57 89 4d dc 89
Stack dump:

Please post your system info and the full crash report (with the stack trace).

Did you already try to uninstall/reinstall the application and to delete all the .dat files?
Make sure you have a backup of the registry and the .dat files.

Thanks
-Mat