I don't actually have an idea of how to fix this.

The problem is I can hit the down arrow on this value one click at a time and wait a fraction of a second and it changes and nothing bad happens.

But once I get down to 0.01, if I click the arrow one more time everything goes to hell and my laptop struggles for a few minutes and then the whole system freezes up and I need to restart.

However, if I manually type 0.009 or 0.005 there is no problem.

This input box starts at 0.1 by default and it can intelligently go down to 0.09 - 0.08 - 0.07 etc. when you click the down button. But when it gets to 0.01 instead of going down to 0.009 it goes down to 0.0001

0.0001 ! wtf?

It would be better if this field used millimeters as its unit instead of meters. It might even be better to replace this with a field like Octree Depth that is found under the Smooth option of the same modifier.