Yeah, thats the strange part about what you described. . .What is different between starting and quitting indi multiple times inside kstars vs starting and stopping indi, closing kstars and starting indi again. That seems to be something that should give the same results to me.

Ok notice how in the second screenshot indiserver is still running after the kstars crash? That is what I expected and I thought that was the cause of your crash when restarting kstars and launching indi. I thought indiserver was still running and when you started it again, there was a bug of some sort there in terms of starting indi when it was already running. There are supposed to be two options, quit the already running one, or don't start it again, connect to the running one. But no, I don't see indiserver in the first screenshot. Very strange. If KStars is all done and indi is all done and everything is closed, then how can there be any difference from launching it the first time? In your crash log it said cfitsio was somehow related, but that doesn't explain this to me yet. Let me get some other opinions.

Let me see if I can get it to do this.

It didn't do it with simulators.

Can you try a couple of different profiles to see if it is caused by a specific driver? If so, we can narrow It down. I don't have the same equipment you do, So your testing is very valuable.

Hi!
Actively browsing the sources, I know that for some time, the mechanism of local connection via a file (AF_UNIX) has been introduced to the `INDI Core Library`.
This may explain why a reboot helps. Please note the /tmp/indiserver and other /tmp/indi* files.

SUCCESS!!!

I created a new profile, and all works now!
My previous profile was created a while ago, just after optical trains came out.
I noticed that there has been some changes to the optical trains (and even the profile settings) when I just created a new one.
So it must have been some error in using the older profile.

Thanks for the suggestion Ron!

I tried to repeat three times the crashes that Peter reported with my setup.
KStars 362 closed normally each time without crashing.
I slewed the scope to several targets : the slew was correct, the dome slaved normally, and I took a sequence of photos (fake because it is very cloudy here).
No problem.
But to go with Peter, I experienced from time to time KStars crashes while closing the app. This might happen during some sessions and then not happen during other sessions. Dont know why.
But not this time.

Jean Claude,

To my knowledge there has been a bug for a long time where when you stop indiserver sometimes kstars crashes. This is a cross platform bug and I think it was being investigated by a couple of different people. I am not sure of the current status of this, it may have been resolved or maybe not. I don’t think that is related to Peter’s bug, but I could be wrong. The reason I don’t think it is related is because Peter confirmed that indi and kstars were fully shutdown before he tried to start it up again, whereas with the bug I am referencing, it’s just when shutting down that it sometimes crashes kstars.

Well I’m happy my ordeal is over!

Peter, does this mean that after you created the new profile it doesn't crash anymore after you start up after closing it? So it was related to an issue with optical trains somehow? Maybe it was an issue with how the optical train had been saved or not saved in your kstars or profile database ?

I still don't understand why it would do that though. . .

I would say we should try to fix whatever it is, but if the only way it would happen is somebody who created a profile around the same time optical trains came out then that is not a common issue and probably won't happen too much going forward.

Ok I re-uploaded binary factory stable to edu.kde.org now.

Sorry about my point concerning a missing localisation of KStars 362 : I played with the "Configure language" menu to test my German and forgot to change it back.
KStars is perfectly localised