The current release binutils 2.17.50
That's OK (later version(s) have bugs with gprof).
on top of it, I have installed MSys 1.0.10
Huh! This is most likely no good. You cannot and should not install MSYS on top of a compiler installation. Usually MSYS is a stand-alone "tool" which refers to the folder where GCC is installed via fstab. So this *might* be a reason.
Right... as a next step: Please try running gprof from the command line and not from within C::B. Does is crash then, too?