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Now gee, what do you expect? How many of your clients demand to run your software on their outdated, unsupported and insecure operating systems (Windows 98 SE was sweet)? And what do you tell them? Even Microsoft has abandoned that product. Seriously, as long as you are using Windows 7 you will get nothing but sympathetic nods as every little issue could be blamed on the fact you are trying to run it on an OS that does not meet the requirements. Nevertheless 11.3 is the current version, so some of your issues may have gotten fixed.

Even at work, where we have DevExpress and a number of other, chunky components installed the IDE loads our big legacy project up in less than 20 seconds. Add 10-15 more seconds of compiling and I am in debugging. Compare that with VS2019, which needs ~1min until IntelliSense kicks in, 1,5 min of compiling, 10 seconds of after-compilation-thinking and finally the project launches. I'm sure there are faster IDEs out there, but Delphi really isn't that bad from startup perspective.

I am not aware of any software that I use that refrains from releasing new versions until the current release version is bug free. Perhaps there are exceptions, but that is just not how software development generally works. To be clear, I don't think it's unreasonable to want Embarcadero to fix bugs, I do too. But complaining about Delphi 12 coming just because Delphi 11.3 isn't bug-free is not reasonable or useful, IMO. For what it's worth, I use Delphi 11.3 all day long. It is the most stable Delphi has been for me in years. I do not regularly experience the kinds of problems you describe, and pretty much every time I have, I could track it down to a component package. I do often have to restart Delphi when I am rebuilding packages or changing packages. It's an area that could use some work but I also understand what is happening -- I have a lot of components installed and any bugs in those components can affect the whole IDE. My biggest complaints have to do with invalid syntax highlighting between ifdefs that the IDE isn't interpreting correctly although compiler works properly. And, CTRL+Clicking doesn't always locate a symbol definition when CTRL+G does, and vice-versa (so I can't just use one or the other, I am often forced to try both methods). But, right now, I am able to use the IDE all day long with relatively minimal frustrations. I'm not trying to disregard the issues you are having, but being realistic means understanding that if Delphi is going to get bug fixes, they have to be able to get revenue, which means sustaining subscriptions, which means shipping new features. As I said before, it is what it is.

On a machine where the application is working, run regedit and look for an entry at one of these locations: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{AB885FB5-0A94-11DC-9263-0002B34C1718} HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{AB885FB5-0A94-11DC-9263-0002B34C1718} If you find an entry at either location, look for a key named LocalServer or InProcServer32. The default value should be the full path of the file that contains the COM class.

There are different levels of beta testers...

Your code is closing the handle, so how the next instance will get ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS ?! Redesign that.

Although I wish Delphi had fewer defects, I wish my own software did as well. ;) Keep in mind that the stability could be caused by an add-on, if you have any installed. When I started using Delphi 11 on a daily basis, it was crashing at least 5 or 6 times a day. It crashed after every single "run with debugging" session ended. And it typically threw exceptions any time I closed the IDE (even if no other exceptions had occurred during that instance). Luckily I had a pattern to investigate. Immediately after I installed Delphi 11, I opened Get-It to see what was available. One of the add-ons I installed was Parallel Debugger from Parnassus. Once I uninstalled Parallel Debugger, the IDE immediately became mostly stable. Since uninstalling Parallel Debugger helped so much, I also uninstalled their Bookmarks add-on. For me now, Delphi 11.3 may throw an exception once a week.

It's been this way since Delphi 1. May as well not wish for a perfect "bug free" release before a new release comes. They'd be out of business. By now we should all understand that in order to benefit from bug fixes, we need to be on subscription, and we will have to upgrade to new versions with new bugs to watch out for. It is what it is. And I agree there are frustrating problems with the IDE, but frankly, most of what you described sounds a lot like a misbehaving package you have installed in the IDE. Especially since you say you get freezing while editing a form. If I were in your position I would be looking into figuring out what packages I may be using causing the IDE to be unstable. Remember, this is Delphi, all those design-time packages are DLLs loaded into the process of the IDE...