GIMP 2.10.8 crashes when doing nothing but opening preferences!

This probably isn't necessary because I see lots of other posts that suggest the current portable GIMP just doesn't work. In my case it took forever to launch and when it finally did the first thing I wanted to do was customize some settings. Selecting Edit>Preferences caused it to crash immediately. I did try it on both a Windows 7 and Windows 10 computer with same result.