Just use the official stable release 1.7.2 instead, that I have never heard of crashing, might be worth checking the rom as well though, with a rom audit tool like clrmamepro
I do recommend for all PC versions of VBA though to use VBA-Over.ini found here that just fixes the save auto-detect for some games (pokemon is a commonly known one not to detect the correct save format used, there are a few other games as well though, that this simple file fixes)
http://vba.ngemu.com/downloads.shtml for the official stable release of VBA
All your internal saves will still work but not save states, actually I recommend against using just save states anyway, if you have anything setup wrong and just use save states you can't fix some setting then load a save state as that will just undo what you just fixed.
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