In the Delphi IDE the target if forced to windows 32 bit. Instead of creating a new VCL Forms Application, I should have chose to create a new multi device application, which allows me to select Win32, Win64, Android and Linix. I thought that explains it all. But rerunning it as a Windows 64 bit target, it no longer bombs with the external exception error. It immediately ends after the connection is set to active. The next statement in the code is a showmessage, then sqlquery1.open, then another showmessage. But the show messages never happen and there is no error message. The program just ends and disappears from the screen.