TestComplete 8 interaction with TADV components causing crashes

I'm having an interesting problem with the open build of a large Delphi application (compiled with Delphi XE and using the Spring framework) using TADV* grids and TestComplete 8.

The scripts navigate to a form containing one or more embedded TADV* grids, and attempt to either select one of the rows or check/uncheck a checkbox for a specific row. The problem is that basic properties appear not to exist. In the Test Complete object explorer attempting to view the grid component will briefly show errors for about 80% of the properties available to Test Complete (including the rowcount and column count properties), then the component will vanish from the object explorer, and the form will appear blank. There's nothing logged anywhere I can find to indicate what kind of error has occurred.

I've attached a screenshot of some of the errors and one of the forms showing its state after the crash occurs.

Does anyone have experience of anything similar, and if so, how did you solve it?

Some extra data:

• The open build is approximately 176MB in size.


• Memory footprint during script runtime is typically between 300 and 500MB.


• I can supply test complete stack dumps from immediately before and immediately after the crash state.


• The first time this problem manifested, it was traced to a bug in Delphi XE where one of the legitimate methods of initializing Spring framework components failed to correctly handle internal resources on compile. Tracing the problem required in the order of 100 builds to narrow the problem down to a single line of code destabilizing the application - this is not something anyone wants to have to do again.