>OK, what's a zombie object?

I've seen that - you can't reference it in code, but you can see it in the debugger. Looks like it still has some PEMs but they are on class default (not what was set in design mode for the instance) or something of the kind. Haven't tried that for a number of years, and may have confused a few issues with those of a member object instantiated via MemberClass/MemberClassLib, which has its .init() firing out of order (before anything else on the parent) but with class default values of its properties, which also behaves a bit zombyish until its turn comes in the instantiation order.