It turned out that the problem is related to the same old NVidia driver with Linux. To fix the crash, I opened the AVD Manager from Android Studio (Tools-> Android-> AVD Manager), and then opened the settings for the virtual device. Then, in the "Performance Emulation" section next to the graphics, I selected "Software" rather than "Automatic" or "Hardware". This does the trick and no more crashes for the emulator, although it seems much slower than before when Emulated Performance supposedly used the default hardware. The following screenshots will hopefully give a better hint of solution.
