Do I zip up the project so others can try it and see what I have?
in case it is not a project containing hundreds of lines of code and zillions of components put on the form, depend on 3th party installed components (unless the problem is specific to that component) then yes. Use the publish project option to only publish the sources that are required to compile your project and zip up the directory in which you published and attach that to a post.
In case it is a big project, then publish your project locally and put the generated files into another directory, load that project into lazarus and keep stripping things down to a minimum amount of code/components but still showing the error.
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate your help but I'm not sure where running the debugger is going to help me.
If you run your application inside the IDE and something goes wrong, then the debugger kicks in automatically. Depending on your project settings something good can come from that (or not). Usually you step through your source code until the debugger catches a (severe) error and lets you know that by popping up a requester (with error description, e.g. division by zero). That way you know which line is responsible for actually generating the error.
In case of a division by zero error, things are pretty conclusive, but your error is a bit different and requires a bit more knowledge. hence why i wrote to attahc the project so that someone more knowledable is able to see if he/she is able to generate the same error.
p.s. - where else can I put writelns so it will help. None of the other procedures come into play if the application won't run??
That depends completely on your project. In case you have many methods/events implemented then you can put it everywhere that you like, even implement events to see how far f.e. creation of your main form went, e.g. onformactivate, onformshow etc can be used for that as well.
But, my first hunch would probably be that you created/generated a class that wasn't registered properly. Either that or you have a messed up form with some remnants of experiments that you did.
The problem right now is that you only describe the error to the best of your ability but, nobody is able to help you with that as it is your interpretation of things. No code means nobody is able to reproduce.