Usually, more information is required for investigating crashes:
Which version of Splunk?
Which platform?
What's in the crash log?
If by chance you're running 4.1x on Windows, the error most likely to points to an issue with corrupted metadata files due to a crash. The corruption of metadata files due to crash will be fixed in 4.1.4. In the meantime you could try to repair your metadata files per this answers post: http://answers.splunk.com/questions/715/corrupt-metadata
Or, contact support and provide a splunk-diag from the instance in question for further assistance.
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