title: Spyder crashes with error: "It seems the kernel died unexpectedly. Use 'Restart kernel' to continue using this console"
body: <p>I have a 64 bit Windows 7 machine I am using Spyder 2.3.8 with Python 2.7 and Matplotlib 1.4.2 ( I tried Matplotlib 1.5.1 and got the same error) </p>
  
  <p>Every time I import matplotlib and then try to plot with it, a window will pop up and has a few times displayed the figure.. but more often than not  I get the restart kernel error. </p>
  
  <p>The code is super simple:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from matplotlib import pyplot
  
  x_values = [0, 4, 7, 20, 22, 25]
  y_values = [0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32]
  pyplot.plot(x_values, y_values, "o-")
  
  pyplot.ylabel("Value")
  pyplot.xlabel("Time")
  pyplot.title("Test plot")
  
  pyplot.show()
  </code></pre>