Hello Bryan,
 BS> I've seen advice that whenever you destroy anything yourself, you
 BS> should immediately set the pointer to nul. Does that solve this
 BS> problem ?
This is just good practice which enables you to check on an object's value 
and know if it exists or not:
  if Assigned(Object) then 
    it exists and you can do something with it
  else
    it doesn't and you may want to create it before you proceed
    or do nothing at all
That is, you can check for the objects _you_ are responsible for. You should 
not be bothered with either cleaning up or creating objects encapsulated 
within other objects and you should not try to get involved. This is mainly 
what OOP is all about.
It wouldn't take you longer than 1 minute to find out whether the font dialog 
checks for a nil value before destroying it's font property. (if it does, 
your effort to destroy it will still be no good bad practice but won't cause 
errors, if it doesn't you'll get the error just the same)
Usually things don't work that way and they should not either. The font 
dialog cannot prevent others doing nasty things with it's object properties 
(well meant or not). It is itself responsible for creating the font object, 
so it will be available to users like you, and it will clean it up too when 
it's no longer needed. It would be almost indecent to interfere :-).
Groeten, Martin.
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