postmaster dies on complicated views

I've had a strange problem with viewing through anything but a basic view.
The view in question is defined as follows:

create view currentinfo
as
select pub_id, type, sum(price*ytd_sales), avg(price), avg(ytd_sales)
from titles
group by pub_id, type;

this is what happens when I do a select * from currentinfo:

PQexec() -- Request was sent to backend, but backend closed the channel
before responding.
This probably means the backend terminated abnormally before or while
processing the request.

What does this message mean? Once I get this error, I have to quit and
relaunch psql before any other queries are successful. I think the problem
may be with the "sum(price*ytd_sales)" selection, since I tried another
query with multiplication in the select clause and it died too.

Thanks in advance,

-David Rugge
http://www.mindspring.com/~davidrugge/index.html