You know what's weird about that exception_access_violation is that I can reproduce it on my development machine, but only in the "Release" build. In the debug build, there's no error.
I'm tempted to say eff it and just make the debug one the release one, even thought the binary is bigger, just because I don't care enough to really fix it if there's an easy workaround.
Very soon though I will be returning this editor to a 100% correct state when it comes to ship editing, but I'm not sure about weapon editing.
After the aforementioned maintenance update for the existing editor, I've been playing with the idea of a full re-write for this editor, but doing it in a way that is more multi-platform-friendly and also more user-friendly.
I thought about using LWJGL/Java, much like Alex uses for the actual game, even to the point of simply importing the same *.jar files as the game itself, for a level of guaranteed compatibility.
I've also considered doing the re-write in C#/Mono/GtkSharp because it has all the same multi-platform benefits, but it's much more familiar to me as a developer because my day job deals with C#.
I'll start a poll for this, since it potentially affects all the modders.