I have copied and compiled the source code available in the section titled "Full Source". http://cairographics.org/threaded_animation_with_cairo/ I adapted this code to a project that I'm working on only to find that the app would crash when I made the window too big. Going back to the original example code, it too crashes when the window is too big ( 1000x1000 or so). I narrowed down in the example that this line appears to be responsible: pixmap = gdk_pixmap_new(window-window,500,500,-1); Where pixmap is of type GdkPixmap*. Resizing the window overwrites pixmap with a new pixmap that is the size of the window. I am doing this in Eclipse Juno in Windows Vista, 32-bit. My compiler is MinGW version 0.5-beta-20120426-1. My GTK+ version is 2.24.10 and apparently Cairo is 1.10.2 I added all of the includes and libraries for GTK and also added compiler switch -mms-bitfields. Is there a limit to the size of a pixmap or something? I'm just starting with GTK with examples so I'm not sure where to go if this example doesn't work.