This is the sign some XUI file got corrupted or out of sync... Are you using a custom skin, or custom fonts.xml file ?...
If yes, try
mv -f ~/.secondlife/skins ~/.secondlife/skins-disabled from a terminal, reinstall the viewer from scratch (using its installer), and restart it...
If this does not work, post the zipped ~/.secondlife/logs/stack_trace.log and ~/.secondlife/logs/CoolVLViewer.log files for that crash.