Your problem is probably not an issue of your version number, but of your WAD file.

WED reads the WAD textures when you add it. If it is a wrong file format or has no correct WAD content, it reads nonsense data and that is likely to crash.

So first make sure that you created the WAD correctly. When 10000 people have no problems adding WAD files and only you have a problem, its obviously not a "bug" of the software. The principle of all software is: garbage in, crash out.

For learning the gamestudio basics, just start with the tutorial.