Okay, I simply can't take this any more so I've downgraded to 1.24.1 .  I'd be really surprised to find that I'm the only one with this issue.  It appears to be a race condition as there's about a 5% chance that it doesn't happen.

For anyone else that also needs to downgrade:  The .deb files are still available in the PPA's pool, but unfortunately not accessible via apt.  You just need to down load the .deb files you need from http://ppa.launchpad.net/geany-dev/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/g/geany/ and install with dpkg.  (I did it that way instead of installing libgtk2.0-dev to compile from source.)