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

I've never heard of behavior like this from Delphi before. A couple of things to look at:

Are you sure the memory on your machine is good? Have you run Memtest on it?? The last couple of times I've encountered crazy behavior from a machine the culprit turned out to be the memory.

Beyond that, remember that anything you install into Delphi runs in the context of the IDE and if it's buggy it can mess up the IDE. Even a component that writes to a wild pointer could do this to you.

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.

Answer 3

Pretty much out of Delphi 5.0 these days. But I do recall it was important to have the latest Build for various reasons. Do you have it?? Go Help->About. I believe this is the latest version: Version 5.0 (Build 6.18) Update Pack 1

Answer 4

i used d5 for a long time & never saw that. i had some other strange things like you mention about needing to build rather than just compile. i have that in d2009 as well.

Answer 5

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 6

Just a thought; pikcing up one of your comments about you having D5 and D7 installed, I'd suggest;

uninstall D7
uninstall D5

reinstall D5
install D5 3rd party components
service pack D5
reinstall D7
install D7 3rd party components
service pack D7

then try again, having done the trick of deleting all the .DCUs in your own project directories.

In my experience I've always been careful to stick to installing them 'in numerical order' and if one needs to be removed, I usually end up removing them all before I start reinstalling.

Answer 7

Which OS are you using? If it's Windows 7, perhaps there are incompatibilities with Delphi 5, since it's a bit long in the tooth now. Perhaps you could try running Delphi 5 in a XP VM.

Answer 8

Since you had no problems with Delphi 7, is there any reason for not migrating this application to Delphi 7? It shouldn't be difficult to do, unless you have some third party components with no source.

Answer 9

GExperts ToDo list window... close it or any other GExperts Windows.. Watch the Task Manager for memory increasing and then stopping after you close any windows.