[Lazarus] Lazarus crashes when opening project under conversion, how to fix?

[Bo Berglund]

I am using Lazarus 2.0.8 32bit in Win 10 x64 with FPC 3.0.4

I am trying to convert a project created in Delphi7 and maintained in
D7 and Delphi 2007 so it can be worked on in Lazarus/FPC.

It is a service application so it uses TService, which does not exist
in FPC. The closest candidate is TDaemon, so on advice here or in the
forum I have tried adding a "rename":

type
  {$IFDEF FPC}
    TService = class(TDaemon)
    private
    public
    end;
  {$ENDIF}

When I did that Lazarus showed a lot of errors when trying to do a
test compile (as expected). I did not have time to fix it though at
the time so I closed Lazarus.

Now I have a problem to even start Lazarus, it immediately shows crash
dialogs saying:
An error occurred at last startup while loading
D:\Engineering\Projects\Sobversio...\RemoteServer.lpi

It is not very useful to see a path that is cut in the middle so I
cannot find where it is at...

How can I find *which* of the projects it is actually trying to load?
I have several test projects created during various attempts at
conversion...

Or can I please open Lazarus *without a project* so I can decide
myself which project to load?

It was half a week ago when I was last using Lazarus as described
above and I cannot remember exactly which version of the converted
code I was dealing with.

So now I am back again and I cannot even start Lazarus because it just
errors out on the old project while giving me no chance to get to the
editor to fix the problem.

It looks by the few dialogs I see before it crashes that the code
contains objects with incorrect or missing properties of some kind and
if I proceed anyway I get to an access violation and Lazarus crashes!

Seems like there is a Catch 22 built into the Lazarus project handling
that disallows one from using the editor to fix project problems....

What can I do in order:
A) To find which actual project file it is having problems with?

B) To load the project into the editor so I can fix whatever problem
it is having?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden