Is this a bug in the Windows control?
Yes, I think you can call that a bug. Particularly nasty on a 64-bit operating system with the platform target set to AnyCPU so there's no reasonable upper-bound on the memory allocation. My machine completely died a swapping death with mouse and Ctrl+Alt+Del unresponsive, I hard-booted it to get it back. Thanks.
Two bugs actually. It starts with the native track bar control not putting a reasonable upper limit on the number of ticks. You can survive that in design mode by assigning the properties in the right order. But it is compounded by a flaw in the TrackBar class wrapper, it assigns the Maximum property before the TickFrequency property when it initializes the native control at runtime. So for a brief moment it still has a gazillion ticks. Well, it is not brief when it is 2 billion of them, like I unwittingly tried.
No simple fix for this and this bug isn't going to get fixed. Use reasonable values, you can always map them by multiplication.