Yes, very frustrating. I was having the same problem on Windows XP, often several times a day. Finally, I deleted all my docks and stopped using it. But, I missed having all my favourite shortcuts and docklets, so I made a new tabbed dock this week and so far, it hasn't crashed at all. I have the weather docklet running and many other docklets and shortcuts are also available.
I don't know what the problem was before, but it appears that deleting the docks you are using now and making new ones, might fix the problem.
I haven't reloaded everything I had before, so maybe I had something on my docks before that was the cause of the problem. I'm just guessing, but maybe internet shortcuts could be the problem. I used to have about 10 of my favourite shortcuts on my old dock, that kept crashing, but now I don't have any and so far, I haven't had a single crash.
I do remember deleting all the available docklets before, but that didn't work, it kept crashing. Do you have any internet shortcuts on your docks? If so, maybe you could delete all of them and see if that fixes things up.
Cheers