@Campbell Barton (campbellbarton), I've verified your suggestion. In all my test cases, I did Load Factory Settings in a Blender session that first loads my defaults (multisampling on, etc). I made a clean setup (removed startup.blend and userpref.blend), and the problem doesn't occur with it.

Another update: on my system, but with a much older driver (340.96) the behaviour is still the same.

@Erick Tukuniata (erickblender), regarding lasso masking, AFAIK it always behaved this way: mask lasso always masks both front- and backfacing polygons, and with symmetry enabled, this results in what you show in your video.

@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht), yes, it's factory settings. In fact, the video was recorded with factory settings as well. Sorry, I should have stated that more clearly to begin with.

Neither 'Texture Sharpening' nor the OpenGL performance slider in nvidia-settings have an effect on this.

Another update: I tried replicating this behavior with 2.75a on the same system, but with that version selection tools operate normally.

I have no overrides in nvidia-settings:

How can this be? Is there some minimum margin to uphold? I've extracted the relevant cage and high-poly geometry from the original file, and there's clearly distance between them:

Guys! The problem is not in quantifying anything. I appreciate the discussion, but please let's return to the title of this report. The problem is that the system requirements page on blender.org:

If it is indeed software implementation, as is stated on that page, would it give any benefit over simply running bundled Mesa with blender-softwaregl? Regardless, what users might do to improve their experience with Blender is beside the point of this report. This report is about (lack of) clarity of information on the blender.org site, not a particular issue of a particular Blender installation on a particular machine. As it is worded right now, users should expect the software to work without a hitch so long as their GPU supports OpenGL and is not an integrated one.

...And yet the screenshot in my first post was taken by a user in #blender on a machine with a GeForce 5700 FX LE (GL1.5). Cycles is selected as render engine, Solid shading mode, yet some objects are rendered completely white. As mentioned, same file opened by several people on newer cards didn't show the same issue. I understand that this particular case needs to go in a separate report, but that's not the first (or second, or tenth) time when people come in with similar problems.

In T46713#345616, @perfection cat (sindra1961) wrote:

Such people can acquire the Previous releases of Blender.

Even it it's a feature, it is at the very least inconsistent. That took experienced users a few moments to figure out on a real file, I can't image what new users would make of it.

Indeed (Stan_Pancakes being me), tested on 64-bit Linux with both 2.74 and 2.74-ecb3362, crashes as described.

Yes, it happens with factory settings too.
Here's the blender -d output, although I don't see any screams of pain in it:

Oh, yes, I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that, we did, and it persists. I should also say that I noticed that on the 630m machine system-info actually reports an Intel GPU (perhaps an unrelated Optimus driver issue?). At first I thought that might be related, but then again, another machine reports nVidia GPU correctly, but still crashes.

Do I need to rebase it or?..

"No one seems to understand" because the initial message was poorly communicated, both here and at blenderartists. The file you linked there (http://www.pasteall.org/blend/31965) does indeed contain a lattice that has Scale way lower than that of a newly created lattice scaled to the same dimensions.

Changed Mesh API naming as requested. Removed ambiguity between paint/sculpt mask descriptions.