I had same issue with my WPF RSS reader, I originally went with Awesomium (I think version 1.6) Awesomium is great. You get a lot of control for caching (images and HTML content), JavaScript execution, intercepting downloads and so forth. It's also super fast. The process isolation means when browser crashes it does not crash the app.
But it's also heavy, even release build adds about 10-15mb (can't remember exact number) and hence a slight start-up penalty. I then realized, only problem I had with IE browser control was that it would throw the JavaScript errors every now and again. But that was fixed with the following snippet.
I hardly used my app on XP or Vista but on Win 7 and above it never crashed (at least not because I used IE browser control)
IOleServiceProvider sp = browser.Document as IOleServiceProvider;
if (sp != null)
{
IID_IWebBrowserApp = new Guid("0002DF05-0000-0000-C000-000000000046");
Guid IID_IWebBrowser2 = new Guid("D30C1661-CDAF-11d0-8A3E-00C04FC9E26E");
webBrowser;
sp.QueryService(ref IID_IWebBrowserApp, ref IID_IWebBrowser2, out webBrowser);
if (webBrowser != null)
{
webBrowser.GetType().InvokeMember("Silent",
BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.PutDispProperty, null, webBrowser, new object[] { silent });
}
}