Flare error: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

Another of those soul-destroying Flare errors that strike you out of the blue when you try to compile output from Flare:

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

There appears to be no solution to this problem as yet. See:

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=1947&start=0&sid=91025ee508cf1c1cb4e32fc0d17b4628

This error happened to me just now. After restarting Flare I was able to complete the compile, but when I clicked to view the output Flare froze. I then went to the output in Windows Explorer and double-clicked the index.html file to have a look at the output in Firefox. At this point Explorer froze on an egg timer. Even after killing and restarting the explorer process in Task Manager, Explorer does not respond and doesn't let me into the Start menu.

I feel a reboot coming on!

The reboot didn't fix the problem. By working backwards I discovered it was a problem with invalid XHTML. One of my topic files had an extra </div> closing tag.

You'd imagine that a little bit of error trapping could have reported an error such as "Invalid XML in topicfile.html." Instead, the last topic in the compiler output had nothing to do with the problem.

My advice if you get this problem is to sort all topic by date modified and then go through, one by one, opening each of them in the XML editor. If one of them fails to open, open it instead in a text editor and track down what's wrong with the XHTML that's causing Flare problems.