IC and NEI arent supposed to crash.
Are you installing codechickencore aswell? It is a requirement for NEI.
I had NEI working in the past, used it long enough to decide I liked CraftGuide better.
When I try to use it now Minecraft immediately crashes back to the launcher. Using:
CodeChickenCore 0.9.0.6.jar
NotEnoughItems 1.6.1.8.jar
The recipes show up in CraftGuide, but they are wrong. It's weird. The top most and sometimes the middle line show up, but the items are in the wrong places and the bottom row is never there. Very odd.
Something went slighty side ways between 282 and 328, or at least in such a fashion as CraftGuide doesn't like it anymore.
Edit: I thought I was up-to-date on my ChickenBones but I guess not. I got ChickenCore 0.9.0.7 and let that install and it opened fine.
Then I added NEI and everything worked ok. The recipes do indeed seem to show up correctly in NEI, so I'm not sure why they aren't in CraftGuide.
I suppose I should learn to use NEI, but I really liked the simplicity of CraftGuide.