Fatal Errors are nasty. Note that Quartus sometimes have internal errors, which is where something in the code is unexpected and it crashes. There is usually a pretty cryptic message that at least aligns to something a developer would understand. I believe a Fatal Error is from the operating system and not tied specifically to something in Quartus. (That doesn't mean it's not Quartus's fault).
Does it occur at the exact same point if you recompile the design? That's usually a decent indicator of whether it's Quartus(in which case it's the same spot) or the machine. The two machine issues I've seen cause this are:
a) Out of memory issues
b) Corrupted memory issues. (I've seen this occur where only a large Quartus compile would use the corrupted RAM, so it seemed like a Quartus only issue)
Checking memory issues and doing a mem integrity test might catch these. (Compiling on another machine is a good way to check the memory too)
As for Quartus, are you using update 2? What about migrating to Q16.1 These are complete guesses on whether they'll help. It might be worth filing an SR, as it's unlikely anyone watching this forum will be able to fix it.
