I've not managed to repro this case.
AFAIK I haven't had any disk errors, nothing in the system event log about it either.
Where is the default location for the spill file? TEMP?
Recently I had D:\ get full, but C:\ has plenty of space and TEMP is on C: -- likely the large file I was working with was on D:
If you didn't specify a spill file path (which is the defualt), the TEMP env var is used. If that's blank, then TMP is used. If that's blank too, then the current directory is used.
If there is a read error, you should see a spill file I/O error message box or some kind of error message box.
What I was seeing would be explained by running out of disk space. However, it doesn't make sense that you weren't getting a message box and the stack dump should be during this message box. Maybe if you held down Esc, you wouldn't see the message box (not sure about that).