Juan & Wayne,
I hit this problem for the first time today. I am running 1171 on a Win 8 system with 32GB of memory.
I have not hit this issue before on 1171 and so did some backtracking to find out why it started happening. The answer for me is that it has to do with the XISF format. After getting an image integration, I saved the image file as both FIT and XISF formats. I closed all other copies of the image and reopened the FIT version. ABE worked fine on the FIT formatted image. I then closed that and opened up the XISF version of the same imahe. ABE consistently throws the "PCL Win32 System Exception" when working with the XISF formatted image. I also played with STF settings to see if it mattered whether STF data was saved with the image. I found no correlation between the STF settings and the ABE exception.
For me, the work-around is to use FIT format for some operations and convert back and forth as desired to avoid the problem.
Hopefully, this will help track down the root cause for the bug...
John