So I've been using unity 4.1.5 and vuforia 2-6-7 because that's the last build that was stable for me.....
I just upgraded Unity to 4.3.2f1 and vuforia 2-8-9 figuring maybe it's fixed, so I set up the build settings and imported the vuforia 2-8-9 sdk package and the image targets example, and it crashes Unity editor when I hit play........
Yes. This is also stated in the first page of the Getting Started guide:
https://developer.vuforia.com/resources/dev-guide/step-1-installing-extension
Windows installation
The recommended development environment for Android is Microsoft Windows 7 32/64-bit or Windows XP. Note that Unity 4.1 or later is required.