Recovering vi crashes

[gsstoller at optonline.net]

	While I try to close (and save, if need be) any  vi  windows that I have open, I still run into cases where I get mail from  root  that I have a killed  vi  process and can recover the file by typing
			vi -r  <file-name>
unfortunately most of the time I get a core dump (which gets named  vi.core ) after doing this, and I can only recall about two occasions when such drastic action didn't happen and I was able to recover the file.
	What is causing this core dump, anything I can do about it?
	After I have tried to recover the file and have gotten the core dump, I still get mail about that file, so someplace in the system there is extant information stored about the killed  vi  process, where is this and how can I get rid of it?  (I presume that the   vi -r  command would have taken care of this had it not crashed.)

	 uname -a  for my system gives:
FreeBSD  4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Sat Apr 21 10:54:49 GMT 2001     jkh at narf.osd.bsdi.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC  i386