Help with strange Delphi 5 IDE problems

Question

Ok, I'm going nuts here. For the last (almost) four years, I've been putting up with some extremely bad behavior from my Delphi 5 IDE. Problems include:

• Seemingly random errors in coride50.bpl
• floating point errors on compiling
• occasional deletions of my source code files
• form and object sizes shifting between instances of working on them
• Loss of links between files on compile: messages that it can't find a function even though it is explicitly referenced
• The linker frequently fails to include valid .DFM files unless a full build is performed instead of a smaller compile

The biggest problem is that my boss isn't believing that this is happening without any user changes making these issues appear. I've already wiped and reloaded Delphi fresh a couple of times, but that is not something I can do again right now. Most of the issues listed can be easily recovered from (either reload the IDE or re-copy the files out of source control), but this is completely nuts. I've eliminated all the warnings and hints from compile time, haven't covered them up. I've done my best to follow Marco and Microsoft's best practices. Is this just me? Am I the crazy one? How can I stop Delphi from causing these headaches anymore?

Answer 1

Pretty sure it is a bad package. If you can come up with steps that fail repeatedly (which I know is tough) then try removing 3rd party (or home grown) packages 1 at a time until it is fixed. Then you at least know which package us causing the trouble.

Once you know what the troublesome package is, you can actually debug the design time code & behavior of the component in Delphi. Just set the Delphi exe as the debug application, and then Delphi will launch another instance of Delphi in debug mode. Reproduce the steps that cause the failure, and hopefully you will get a good idea of what code in the package is causing the problem.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I have never seen any version of Delphi delete files under any circumstances.

Do you have any IDE plug-ins installed? This would be my first guess.