InDesign CS4 crashes generating a TOC

Question

I have read about other users problems with TOC's, but none of their solutions seems to be any help. My InDesign CS4 crashes either when I try to generate the TOC or when I select a specific paragraph style setting up the TOC. Unlike the users of later versions I get no message when the program crashes - it just happens.
I am working on a book with 40 files (chapters) and inserting index codes and generating index is no problem. I have 12 GB RAM. Please help me.
Leif

Answer 1

Now I have performed your suggestions. I split one of the three documents in half and tried to open another document in the book - and the program crashed. I continued to spilt the halves, but since either half still caused a crash, i suspected that neither the text nor the pictures were the problem. I selected one of the halves and removed all text, all pictures, all master objects, but even if I now worked with two blank pages, the program still crashed!!
Then I studied the panels and removed all unused object formats, paragraph formats, character formats etc. At last I noticed that the index panel still contained a reference - even if all text (and with that also all index references (entries)) was removed.
Trying to open this reference to see what it contained, the program crashed even if I had only the document in question open!! I removed the index reference - and the program did not crash any more!!!
When I removed this particular reference in the two other documents, the document did not crash any more!!! And of course I removed it from all documents and now I can open all my 45 documents in the book without problems.
I suppose that the reason why this index reference caused the problem was that it contained slashes. The referred  text was
Badeværelse/værksted/mørkekammer
which means Bathroom/workshop/darkroom, but in fact the meaning is important.
The conclusion is: InDesign cannot handle slashes in index references which conclusion I hope you will distribute to any user with problems.
Thank you for supplying me with tools to solve my problem.