External Exception EEFFACE in Delphi

This is not an exact answer but may help you with overcoming the error by describing my experience with it.

I received this error regularly when I went to Windows Vista and 7. The same code never received that error message on Windows XP. I could put a break point on the first line of the dpr file and found that it always seemed to occur when creating the splash screen to my applications. I tried various other ways to do splash screens but they always eventually resulted in getting an EEFFACE error when debugging.

So to overcome this issue, I now put

if DebugHook = 0 then

when I create and access the splash screen. The splash screen to my applications do not appear now when I'm debugging but at least I don't get that EEFFACE error anymore.

This is clearly something happening in the Delphi evaluator (which is part of the compiler). The odd thing is that if it is, in fact, going through writeobj.c, something is certainly not quite right. If you can reproduce this with a test case, please report it in QualityCentral (http://qc.embarcadero.com).

EEFFACE is the SEH exception code used by C++, which is "leaking" out to some Delphi code (in this case the IDE itself). When the exception code is not a Delphi generated exception or a hardware related exception, Delphi simply maps it to EExternalException.

It seems that "External exception" isn't a Delphi's bug, I had this exception times ago and it was probably a problem with the motherboard, or with the hardware, because the program worked well at other machine.