Had an intermittent problem with Google Earth where it would launch and then crash suddenly just after the rendering of the globe completed. After much troubleshooting trial and error, disabling the gnome screensaver seems to have corrected the issue.

FYI my graphics card is Radeon 520mb X1650 PCI-e, ATI proprietary drivers (8.50.3, GL version 2.1.7659), compiz effects turned off when running Google Earth.