I have a frame that never had any problems before. Now when I am in the Delphi 6 IDE and I try to draw an instance of it on a Form in design mode, the IDE exits immediately without any crash errors, dialog boxes, or Watson style “please report this error” message boxes. I am running on Windows XP and I have never seen the Delphi IDE do this before. The frame doesn’t even have any of my custom components on it, just some of the stock Delphi VCL components and a few third party components from a library that I have used without trouble for years. I tried several other frames resident in my project and I can still create those at design time without error.
Note, I did try a complete clean of all project DCUs and rebuilt several Delphi packages for my custom VCL components just in case but those efforts changed nothing.
Does anyone have any tips for diagnosing and fixing this problem?
It is possible to configure Delphi to debug itself. You launch a second copy of Delphi, and you might be able to see where in your code, and the only reasonable thing I can assume is that suddenly there is a problem with the code of the third party library components. To locate the source and line number of that crash, the Delphi debugger itself may be of some use.
Simply launch the third party component with Delphi.exe as the host executable (for Delphi 6 and 7), or bds.exe (for more recent Delphi versions). (In the IDE using Run Parameters, in the Host Application, put delphi.exe or bds.exe)
Then once you’ve located the source of the exception and fixed the code and recompiled the component packages containing that code, your problem may be solved.
Related answer by me
(Note that the madExcept idea is equivalent in that it might also give you a stack traceback to help you find what code is crashing, but in case it doesn’t this technique is also valuable to know about.)