Pidgin periodically crashing since 2.7.7

Pidgin has started crashing recently... (I am currently running Pidgin 2.7.9) this is the error message shown when run thru debugger:

Unhandled exception at 0x77059d15 in pidgin-portable.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000065.

Any ideas what might be the issue? The only recently-added plugin I use is SIPE 1.10.0 (Windows), but this error occurs even if that is not installed.