It seems that both these versions are unstable - leading to application or even system freezes. The problems occured during working with Scribus style manager - creating new, editing styles. After compiling Scribus 1.4.3 from source the errors are no longer occuring.
1) Please post your `emerge --info' output in a comment. 2) Please run scribus from a command line and capture its output. 3) If you see segmentation faults, do a gdb backtrace on those. 4) Explain what you are doing in the application while this "instability" manifests.
I seem to have resolved the issue by removing the .scribus settings directory from my home directory. Everything seems to be working now. Sorry for this false alarm.
I described the problem in more detail here: http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11711 In case, by any chance, someone has the same problem with the style manager.
