Component Properties panel stuck/broken

Xcelsius Engage 2008 5.1.1.0, Build 12,1,1,344

MS Office 2007 (12.0.6324.5001) SP1 MSO (12.0.6320.5000)

Windows XP SP2

In the main project I have been developing for the past week, the Properties Panel appears to be completely broken all of a sudden. With some effort, I can eventually manage to double-click on an existing object and bring up its properties, but it often requires clicking around to different components, hide/unhiding them, lock/unlocking them etc. first before I can do that.

New objects refuse to appear in the Object Browser at all even though they show up in the design area when I drag them in, and even double-clicking them after jumping through the above hoops has no perceptible effect. (They can be resized and dragged around, though, and no, sorry, right-click context menu options are all grey).

The moment the issue seemed to begin was when, in this same project, I attempted to select multiple components in the object browser to edit one field, but aborted that attempt in favor of editing one object that was not in the group. The objects, incidentally, were each sitting inside different groups containing other objects, and all of these groups were sitting inside one main Panel container. All of a sudden, my selection was "stuck" and Xcelsius behaved very sluggishly and finally crashed. I didn't connect this to my select action, however, because I chalked it up to being yet another instance of [the performance issue I documented previously|Frequent crashes when running Excel 2007, Xcelsius 4.5 and Xcelsius 2008; (Nov 7).

Realizing this connection later, I also attempted to multi-select objects again in a variety of ways, hoping to magically reverse the problem somehow, but fortune did not smile on me and the issue has remained.

After much trial and error, and several system reboots, it seems that my Xcelsius 2008 is stuck this way. I plan to reinstall it soon, but in the interests of providing you in QA/Support with the information that you'll likely need, I'm willing to delay this step. That said, I really don't have much time to deal with this sort of thing right now. I really need to get past this and other issues soon so that I can move forward towards a looming project milestone, and if I can't I may have to scrap the effort and go with a different solution entirely. I sincerely hope another SP or FP is due out soon.